Germany-Switzerland Train Tour

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. We used DB Navigator, bahn.de, Omio for Germany and SBB for Switzerland to buy train tickets, board the train, and present the QR code to the ticket inspector. 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 GPSmyCity (20 USD/year).

Trains

• German ICE trains were fast, comfortable, with free WiFi and quiet 1st class cars.

• 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.

• Trains generally ran within 10 minutes of their scheduled time.

• 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

• 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. In Switzerland, our egg cooker required a Euro-to-Swiss (Type J) adapter because it had thick pins Swiss electrical outlets are thin. Here is our typical breakfast:

• Tap water: Safe and free everywhere.

• Weather: It was a pleasant 23 °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.