This August we embarked on a train tour across Germany and Switzerland, visiting a different city every day. Our route was: Düsseldorf – Köln – Koblenz – Heidelberg – Freiburg – Luzern – Interlaken – Bern – Zürich – Stuttgart – back to Düsseldorf
We chose the cities so that each train journey was around one hour. Every afternoon, we traveled to a new city, rested at the hotel, took an evening walk, ate dinner, then the next morning had breakfast, checked out while leaving our baggage at the hotel, explored the city for a couple of hours, picked up our luggage, and continued on to the next city.
Booking Trains and Hotels
We had secured our train tickets and hotel bookings as early as April. It is not critical for train tickets because you will always find a train with paying around 20% more if you buy on the day of your journey. Buying individual tickets for each route was much cheaper than buying a Eurail Pass. Hotels must be booked in advance, otherwise you won't be able to find a room.
The entire process was digital. To buy train tickeds, we used DB Navigator, bahn.de, Omio for Germany and SBB for Switzerland to buy train tickets. You don’t need a physical ticket to board—just show the QR code to the ticket inspector after finding a seat. Seats usually display their reservation status on a small LCD screen next to them. If you don’t have a reservation, simply choose a seat that isn’t reserved.
We used Booking.com for hotel bookings, making sure our hotels were within 15 minutes walking distance of of train stations. We complemented our city explorations with walking routes from the GPSmyCity app (20 USD/year).
Trains
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German ICE trains were fast, comfortable, with free WiFi and quiet 1st class cars.
Note that sometimes they change the train platform/track number ("Gleis" in German). Pay attention to the screens and announcements. In the below picture, the platform of our train has been changed from 5 to 4:
Swiss regional trains were slow and more scenic, but 2nd class trains typically lacked WiFi. Even station WiFi required SMS verification—which didn’t accept Turkish numbers. That left us dependent on hotel WiFi unless we wanted to pay roaming fees.
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Trains generally ran within 10 minutes of their scheduled time.
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Seat reservations cost 7 euros per person, but if you travel outside rush hours, they’re unnecessary, there are plenty of empty seats.
One of the trip’s strongest impressions was how deeply rail networks shape daily life in these countries. Every town is linked by trains running at 150 km/h or more. This creates not just convenience for travelers, but also massive employment opportunities for technicians, engineers, and operators who maintain and innovate these networks.
As the saying goes: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation." For a deeper dive into this idea, I recommend the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes.
Practical Travel Notes
We were always able to pay by credit card. Only once did my card not work in a grocery store, and I had to pay in cash. Having 200 euros in cash will be more than enough.
Breakfast: Hotel breakfasts average 20 euros per person. Since we had modest breakfast needs, we skipped them, preparing our own breakfast. A nice side benefit was that we didn’t have to conform to the hotel’s breakfast hours and each member of our family could sleep as much as they wanted. Grocery chains like REWE, Lidl in Germany and Coop in Switzerland became our go-to spots. Here is our typical breakfast:
In Switzerland, our egg cooker required a Euro-to-Swiss (Type J) adapter because it had thick pins, while Swiss electrical outlets are designed for thin ones:
Tap water: Safe and free everywhere.
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Weather: It was a pleasant 25 °C on August 4, but by August 11 a heat wave had reached Germany and Switzerland, with temperatures rising to 35 °C, making walking exhausting. It lasted for a week and subsided just as we returned. Locals said this happens only once a year, and we were a little unlucky to catch it.