We spent a week over Christmas in Switzerland on a holiday organised with a company called Railtrail. It was a very different way to spend Christmas, with strangers rather than with our families. There were quite a lot of single men who, I suspect, prefer this rather than being lonely or with relatives who tolerate them for the sake of the festive season.
There were lovely moments. Highlights included walking through a snowy landscape in the Alps on Christmas day, another on Boxing Day, the delights of Swiss trains, getting naked in the sauna, a ferry on Lake Lucerne and Luzern itself, which is a marvellous town.
But.
We understood, when we booked, that this was not one of their holidays aimed at rail enthusiasts. However, our tour manager was interested in little else. He was incredibly knowledgeable about trains and tracks and rail systems but he had never previously visited the places we were going to. Nor, it seemed, had the scheduler. On the first day we had three and a half hours to explore Grindelwald, a charming town with little more than a single street; we had a leisurely lunch and were back at the station in two hours. The next day was worse. Einsiedeln boasts a monastery, which was closed except for a tour starting at 2 PM (our train left at 2.11) and a church which was all-but closed while a service took place. We were supposed to wander around for another three-and-a-half hours. On both these days the tour manager, either realising that we would not have enough to do or wanting to get more time with trains, suggested alterations to the programme to reduce the time wandering streets. This problem was repeated on the fifth full day (unless you are eating and drinking on the Rigi there really isn’t any way of profitably using over two hours); the last day was free.
We made the most of our time, discovering Luzern, a lovely town. But if it had not been for other travellers recommending things that they had done, we would have struggled to enjoy ourselves. Normally we would look to a tour manager to enrich our understanding of the places we visited but, unless there was a train-related fact, he was almost entirely ignorant. For example, he delighted in telling us that on one journey we would see the church of Saint Gallen from three sides but he never said a word about the church itself, not who Saint Gall was. He knew where the Transport Museum in Luzern was, but apparently nothing else. He told us nothing about the history or culture of Switzerland, or its demography, or its politics. I suspect he wasn’t interested. But we were.
He was perfect for a group of train enthusiasts. But on the last day, when my wife became sick on Eurostar, he did nothing but occasionally murmur sympathy. Others in our group had been ill earlier in the week and he seemed concerned but not to the point of doing anything. There were times, such as when he disappeared to collect train numbers, that it seemed we were on Henry’s holiday.
Despite what they say, Railtrail is for enthusiasts, not travellers. We won’t be using them again.
NB: St Gall (c550 - 646) was a monk, possibly originally from Swabia, which is now German-speaking Switzerland, who became a disciple of Irish monk Columbanus who founded monastic schools in the Vosges area of what was then Burgundy. The Abbey of Saint Gall, around which the town of Saint Gallen grew, was originally founded in the 900s on the site of Gall's hermitage. Saint Gall ius also the name of a type of hard cheese.
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