Switzerland’s latest high-tech train, the GoldenPass Express has been named after five-time Grammy Award winner Shania Twain. Having taken its first journey on 11 December, the train is the first non-stop service to connect Montreux and Interlaken Ost.
“With the GoldenPass Express, everything comes in pairs”, a statement from Montreux Oberland Bernois Railway Company (MOB) explains, as the train is operated by a collaboration between MOB and BLS. It also operates on two different networks, needing to adapt to two gauge dimensions and two platform heights. Moreover, linking the two regions, it connects two languages and two cultures. So “it was only natural that two trains joined at Gstaad station for the official inauguration. One from Montreux, the other from Interlaken.”
History, innovation, landscape, local products… The GoldenPass Express is Switzerland as we like it.
Georges Oberson, MOB Managing Director
One of the trains was named by the world-famous music star Shania Twain. The Canadian singer is the godmother of the Shania Train. A resident of Tour-de-Peilz, by Lake Geneva, for 10 years Twain inaugurated the train on 9 December. The other train, named Gstaad, was christened by Mike von Grünigen, a Swiss ski legend native from Saanen, Bern.
This inauguration was a historic, as the two regions had been waiting for over a century for a direct rail link. The idea of connecting the lakes of Geneva, Gstaad and the lakes of Thun and Brienz dates back to 1873, when the three great regions were united, but when the tracks were built, they were built with different gauges: a metric one (1 m) between Montreux and Zweisimmen and another of normal gauge (1.435 m) between Zweisimmen and Interlaken.
The GoldenPass association was created in 1924 and in 2008, MOB came up with the idea of modifying the bogies instead of the gauge of the entire track. With a variable gauge bogie, the train passes from one track to another, shortening the trip from Montreux to Interlaken. MOB partnered with the company Alstom, together with which it developed four prototype bogies for passenger locomotives in 2019. A MOB locomotive pulls the train between Montreux and Zweisimmen, while between Zweisimmen and Interlaken, a BLS locomotive does.
Design of the train was taken care of by Italian firm Pininfarina, famous for creations commissioned by automative brands such as Ferrari and Peugeot. “Having to deal with new safety standards has been a stimulus to our creativity, rather than a limitation,” Alfredo Palma, design project manager at Pininfarina, told CNN. “In every project, whether it is automotive, transportation or architecture, our goal is to create beautiful objects while overcoming technical or regulatory obstacles. With MOB we have created a train that offers an immersive travel experience, in total symbiosis with the beauty of the surrounding nature.”
Currently, the service only runs once a day, but will increase to four times a day from 11 June.
