Bernina Red Train

 Dear Gentle Readers

It was a rainy day in Tirano for our journey on the famous Bernina Red Train. This is the view from our compartment before we left. We actually caught a taxi from our apartment to the train station because trying to manhandle four suitcases and an umbrella in the rain was impossible. Cost €14 just for the short two block trip.

Here's my gorgeous wife in our compartment waiting for the train to leave. She is very excited about the train ride. We initially had the carriage all to ourselves until about halfway when other people boarded the train.

This is the spiral ramp our train is about to ascend. An ingenious way to gain altitude in a short distance.

Here we are on the other side of the ramp about to ascend it.

On steep turns the end of the train is visible through the window. It's quite a long train.

Because it was raining, my camera kept focussing on the window rather than the view so a lot of my photos were useless. This was one of the better ones, showing towns nestled in valleys between incredibly high mountains.

You often could not see the tops of mountains because they were covered in low clouds like this one.

This incredibly green alpine lake came into view.

A stone house in the alps, why not use natural building material that's all around.

When we got above 2000 metres it started to snow. I haven't seen snow since I saw it on Mount Kosciuszko in 1979 and before that when I was a kid in Tasmania around 1964-65.

This is the map of the railway that's on every table on the train. Our track is on the lower right, from Tirano to St Moritz.

These barriers are rock catchers, to prevent large rocks and trees falling on the line.

Victoria caught this photo on her phone.

Also this alpine river.

And your erstwhile scribe, caught unawares.

 As we rolled into St Moritz, finally managed to get a decent photo of the snow covered mountains.

This is the view from our window.

I managed to snag a cable car in the distance above St Moritz.

This is the town of St Moritz, nestled amongst the cloud covered mountains.

Tomorrow we catch the train to Chur where we will collect our car for the drive to Zermatt to see the most famous of the Swiss mountains, the Matterhorn.