Strasbourg to Como

 Today was meant for sightseeing with a route through Switzerland. We took a regional train from Strasbourg to Basel where we were going to take a direct train to Lugano. Because of a derailment on the Gothard tunnel earlier this year most of the trains currently go over the older alpine route, which is a lot more interesting that looking at the inside of a tunnel. 

When our train was due to leave nothing happened! This is Switzerland the land of punctual trains, and we just stood there! After a couple of minutes an announcement in German said a load of stuff I didn't understand, then one sort sentence in English - this train is not going to run. 

There was much joking in German, which I did understand about how the Swiss laugh at the Germans for their late trains! 

It turns out that the toilets weren't working and as it was a long run this would be a serious problem. We were redirected to an alternative which involved a quick change (7 minutes) in Zurich. 

The remainder of the journey went about as planned, and we did see some spectacular scenery. 


French regional train. I'm not sure that the colour scheme has kept up with the times, it was probably modern in its day, but I don't know when that was. Very comfortable though, and pretty fast. 



In Basel station. 







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Today in Plzen

Image
It's been an interesting day here in Plzen (pronounced Pilsen). This morning we thought we'd have to take a tour of the Pilsner Urquel brewery in either Czech or German and use an app to get some sort of commentary. But it turned out that there was an English language tour at 16.30, so we booked ourselves on that while we were there in the morning.  We bought some stuff in the gift shop and then went to the puppet museum, which was more interesting than I expected!  The brewery tour was good, particularly ending as it did with a glass of their unfiltered beer straight from an enormous barrel.  A Liquid lunch Inside the cathedral in the town square The highlight of the tour a glass of the product!  Tomorrow we heard for Berlin for our last day before travelling back to Sweden on the sleeper leaving on Thursday afternoon.  
Read more

Salzburg

Image
  Yesterday (Saturday) we chose to do a 'churches of Salzburg' walk with a view to see if there were any performances we could visit.  And sure enough Mozart was on offer in one of them! I was surprised to find that I've never heard Misse Brevis before. The only cost, which was actually a bit of a bonus because it put it on context, was that it was part of a full Catholic mass.  This is the view from our breakfast!  This afternoon we are going to a paid concert. Tomorrow we're off to Plzen, to learn about beer! 
Read more