Swiss train travel - a holiday from uncertainty

There was thunder and lightning in the night. We woke up to see clouds rolling in from the west into the Rhine Valley, giving the landscape a magical and mysterious countenance. Rain was promised for later, but after a memorable Swiss fruhstuck, Heinz went and collected a Renault Megane estate from the Mobilis a local car short term rental pool, to drive us to one of their favourite places in the mountain territory of nearby Lichtenstein, on the other side of the Rhine Valley.

Half an hour later we were climbing a thousand metres up a winding  mountain road to a calm and solitary place in the forest, where currently a clinic is being constructed for patients suffering from burn-out. When it's open, it is unlikely to suffer from a scarcity of clients in our insanely pressurised modern world. We parked nearby, and followed a pathway along a contour through pine trees rooted seemingly precariously, on an extremely steep mountainside. I was surprised to see two different enclosures in which donkeys were grazing and wondered why there were being raised here so remotely from the urbanised valley floor below.

Cloud was already partially obscuring the view below, but only towards the end of our walk did it envelop us. Shortly after we reached the car, it began to rain, and continued steadily until it was time for me to take my leave and return to Montreux. Clare stays another day, but I need to travel to Verbier tomorrow, an hour's journey from Montreux, for a wedding preparation ahead of Saturday's service.

The train from Buchs to Sargans was three minutes late. This left one minute to change to the mainline express train to Zurich - four minutes allowed by the phone app. Energised by the challenge, I ran to the necessary platform, arriving as the express pulled in. It then waited to collect case-lugging stragglers, while I settled into a seat and regained by breath. We left three minutes late. How kind. We arrived punctually in Zurich, where the Lausanne train was waiting. Likewise at Lausanne, the train to Montreux  arrived conveniently as I crossed the platform to wait for it. 

This took me to Montreux in time buy some bread and wine before returning to Church House, as it was a late opening night at the COOP. The only disappointment was a half hour wait for a bus to Territet to complete the journey. The scheduled bus didn't appear. The next one wasn't a full sized electric bendy bus, but smaller. It was rammed with passengers already.  If it hadn't been raining, I'd have walked back anyway, but didn't relish the thought of arriving soaked through,. So I waited instead. I might well have been back in Cardiff waiting for a bus. Timetabling post-rush hour, when services and vehicles deployed change over, rarely delivers what post rush hour bus travellers find satisfactory. 

I'd like to think that in the next quarter of a century, real-time information about travellers' needs on local public transport networks will provide services to match, in the way that rail networks across Switzerland seem to achieve as a matter of national pride.

    

A day on the train

One of the reasons for obtaining abonnenements demi-tarifs was the cost of an outing to the Rhine Valley in the eastern Swiss Canton of Saint Gall to see our old friends Heinz and Maria-Luisa. Clare studied eurythmy with them in Stourbridge when I was Team Rector of Halesowen in the late 1980s. Since we last visited them five years ago Heinz has retired, and they've moved from their wonderful eco-house in Grabs to a smaller modern penthouse apartment in nearby Buchs. It's not that we saved much money on the total expenditure for this trip, but rather savings on all other trips we can make in the month's duration of the abonnement which justifies the initial expenditure.

This morning there was a midweek BCP Communion service at St John's, but nobody came, apart from Clare and I, but we continued with the service anyway, so we could remember our Parish Priest back home in Cardiff, Fr Mark Preece, who's in hospital for an operation. This meant that we could leave an hour earlier for our trip across Switzerland. 

First, we took the Train Regional to Lausanne, then the InterCity to Zurich in the north east of the country, to connect with another InterCity train to Coir/Chur caiptal of the the Grisons, somewhere we've never been. In each case, we had time to make the connection without difficulty, aided by the brilliant and comprehensive SBB/CFF smartphone app (or internet site, take your pick), which gives timings and platform numbers, all the detail a traveller could possibly want in your own language. It's so accurate, it's what the train conductors use. Our total journey time, four hours.

The Zurich Coir/Chur train connects with a local shuttle train to Buchs at Sargans, where Heinz met us at tea-time, and took us to a local bus from the station while he cycled home ahead of us. The bus gave us a few moments of humour, as the driver couldn't get it to start properly, and kept diving under the bonnet before he could get all the electronic on-board systems started working properly, and when we got going, he grumbled to us in Schwiezerdeutch over the tannoy.

Heinz and Maria Luisa's apartment is on the roof of a three storey block with amazing views of the  mountains enclosing the Rhine Valley on all sides. The south side walls are mainly high strength insulating glass, as are the interior rooms on this side. Temperature control and room privacy is managed by the use of opaque blinds. With a series of glass doors to open, rather than windows, it's easily possible to ventilate the apartment for eight months of the year. What it's like in colder times it's hard to imagine, though it has a wood burning hearth set in among the south side windows, also, I think, underfloor heating. We had much more to talk about than domestic design, so some of my curiosities remain un-tended. 

The evening was spent catching up with each others' lives, and eating outdoors on the apartment terrace as the sun set. We're in a Canton where church bells still ring at six in the morning, nine at night and at lunchtime, quite apart from church clocks ringing four times an hour. Such timekeeping is a legacy from the old days in this era of digital timekeeping, but it's likely to be bound into civil as much as ecclesiastical regulation to maintain the status quo.

Church bells are rung nowadays not by an ancient sacristan entrusted with the job, but by an electro-mechanical timing device, which is far more impersonal. No doubt many people if not most, regard this as redundant, unnecessary, if not an intrusion, in a world oppressed by many digital alarms. For me the sound of church bells, with their unique character in every place they are rung, by whatever means, for whatever purposes are a reminder of the opening words from the Paschal Vigil.

'Christ, yesterday, today and forever: all time belongs to him and all eternity, to Him be glory forever.'

Journey to Switzerland

Yesterday morning, I celebrated the Eucharist at St John's with nine others, took my leave of them and returned home immediately to finish off packing my case and eating an early lunch. Just after one, Mary our neighbour drove us to Cardiff Central station to take the train to Bristol, with lots of time to spare, just in case there were delays in arriving at Temple Mead station. This happened to us the last time we travelled over to Bristol Airport to fly to Budapest a year ago, causing unwanted and stressful delay in arriving for our flight. This time, all was well, except that the airport shuttle bus stop has moved from one side of the station entrance to the other for the first time in all the years we have been using the service.

Bristol Airport was, as to be expected in mid-August, quite busy. People were queuing, but moving through the check-in area surprisingly quickly. Check-in desks were apparently replaced just last month by an array of automatic self-service terminals, supported by airline staff. The system is very simple. Your flight ticket QR code is scanned, your bag is weighed, and as long as it conforms to the prescribed weight limit and content declaration, the machine prints a baggage label which you apply yourself. The bag is then taken to the usual check-in desk site and placed on a conveyor, where the label is scanned to check that it's the correct one issued against the ticket. 

I think the label may have an RFID tag plus a bar code to make it recognisable to both standard systems in use at different airports. The technology now being rolled out to regional airports has been around for some years and it works impressively. Staff are available to help travellers on a friendly face to face basis, but are more efficiently used, as those used to this routine check themselves in and move on quickly.

There was a queue of several dozen moving at a steady pace through the security clearance area. This too has been remodelled in the past year. There are now six luggage and people scanning terminals, half of which were in use. This procedure only took us ten minutes surprisingly, and is a testimony to improved efficiency. People moan about long delays at larger airports. Well, Bristol's queue of maybe fifty people at a time, scaled up five or ten times at any moment in a bigger airport, even with a bigger system working at full capacity, will scale up the delay in getting through. It's still amazingly efficient at processing people unless the technology fails, or staff don't show up for work when expected. Millions of people around the world, on the move, day and night, and under such constraints. It's a remarkable everyday achievement.

As testimony to increased airline traffic, our flight was twenty minutes late taking off, and made up five minutes en route. The queue at passport control was long and slow, and although this meant we picked up our luggage as soon as we arrived to reclaim it, we missed the half part nine InterRegio train to Montreux by a few minutes, and had to wait forty minutes for the next one. Church Warden Jane met us at Montreux Gare at twenty to midnight, and drove us the last kilometre to St John's Church House.

While the church is characteristically Victorian (dating from 1875) and Anglican in appearance, the house adjoining is characteristically Swiss with shutters and dormer windows in the roof space. The upper interior is entirely clad with wooden panelling, and has four bedroom, two bathrooms, a large landing space and a small upstairs rood terrace in the space between house and church. It's a very spacious house, and the only disadvantage, like so many English churches of this period, is that it's by a busy main road and railway line. Thankfully, it's pretty quiet at night, and we slept well.

    

Swiss discount travel sorted

Yesterday morning I took a funeral service at Thornhill crematorium for a man who'd died alone at home. He'd been an angler who'd lived in Cardiff in the last decade of his life, and had not made any friends. There were just six mourners. It was possibly the smallest funeral congregation I've had in decades. Being alone in the wilds of nature can be a consolation, and for some even, a way of life. To be alone in a city, infirm only able to remember past haunts is sad to contemplate.

Clare and have both been thinking about our forthcoming time in Switzerland, people we hope to see, places to visit. Our dear friends Alec and Ann-Marie will be in Anzere as we arrive, and as that's not too far from Montreux we'll be able to meet up with them. Cousin Dianne and husband Ian plan to be in Monthey some time during our stay, and we have Geneva visits lined up as well. When I checked my regular medication, I found I'd be a week short before returning home, so I wrote to my GP, and dropped a letter into the surgery, conveniently located near St Catherine's, where I went to celebrate the midweek Eucharist for ten of us this morning.  

Travel in Switzerland is a pleasure, since public transport is so good. It's expensive, but value for money if you buy an abonnement demi-tarif which gives you 50% discount on public transport fares and some special offers on museum entry charges etc. When we were in Geneva we had an annual subscription, but visitors can buy one for a month. It can be obtained on-line, but there are several websites offering similar services. Sorting out which one to use and how the system delivers the product is a headache, because several options are available - digital, postal, pick up at the airport station on arrival - but, by the evening we had spent nearly a hundred quid each and received a digital document for printing which, presented with one's passport entitles us to half price train tickets. The outlay will soon be covered with trips we have planned.