The Long Haul: Lucerne to Salzburg
Six and a half hours across Switzerland and Austria. One country traversed in under thirty minutes. A six-minute connection that required no running at all.
When we planned the Second European Rail Odyssey, the intention was always to focus on the destinations — the cities, the hotels, the meals, the moments that happen when you finally stop moving. The train was the thread, not the story. That was the first Odyssey’s job.
Then we sat down to write the journey from Lucerne to Salzburg, and it became clear that six and a half hours across Switzerland and Austria — through an entire sovereign nation in under thirty minutes, over a mountain pass that makes you stop talking — wasn’t a preamble. It was a chapter.
So here it is. The Long Haul.
This is Part 4 of the Second European Rail Odyssey. We are leaving Lucerne on the 7:35 AM train and arriving in Salzburg six and a half hours later. Everything that happens when we get there is Part 5.
Six and a Half Hours of Yes
Departure morning in Lucerne arrived at an indecent hour for anyone on vacation. We blearily checked out of the Renaissance, hurried through the damp morning air to the Luzern Bahnhof, and boarded the 7:35 AM train before the city had fully decided to wake up. This was a travel day — six and a half hours of rail threading through Switzerland, a blink-and-you-miss-it transit through an entire country, and halfway across Austria before we’d see a hotel room. We didn’t mind. On a journey like this one, the train is never just the means to the destination. It is part of the destination.
Fifty minutes later we pulled into Zurich, and the contrast with Lucerne was immediate. We had left behind the quiet, blanket-draped charm of our lakeside city and stepped straight into the financial engine room of Switzerland at peak morning rush. When our connecting train to Austria arrived, the commuter crush came with it — aisles filled shoulder to shoulder with sharp suits and heavy student bags. We had boarded expecting a quiet long-haul journey and found ourselves squished in with half of Zurich instead, wondering how long we’d be riding like this.
The answer, as it turned out, was not long. What we hadn’t anticipated were the intermediate stops between Zurich and Sargans — stops that aren’t always prominently listed on a long-distance through booking. Each one initially sent me quietly consulting the app, double-checking we hadn’t somehow boarded the wrong train. But each stop also emptied the car a little further, and by the time we reached Sargans just under an hour later, the standing passengers had poured out onto the platforms and the frantic energy of the city dissolved completely. What had felt like an anxious start turned out to be exactly the relief we needed. We were left with a cabin of fellow long-haul travelers finally settling in — and the journey could properly begin.
A Note on Those Intermediate Stops
On a long-distance through booking, the stops between Zurich and Sargans aren’t always prominently listed — which can make each unfamiliar pause feel like you’ve boarded the wrong train. You haven’t. Those stops are scheduled and normal, and after Sargans things move along exactly as expected. The anxiety is understandable but unnecessary.
We hadn’t waited for Sargans to make our move. The moment we boarded we picked up our bags and headed straight for the dining car — and this is where reserved seats earn their keep. We didn’t have to leave someone behind to guard our spots or worry about returning to find them taken.
Seat reservations on European trains are technically optional on most routes — you’ll often hear that there’s no need to book since open seats are plentiful. On our very first rail journey, back in 2016, we watched a young woman board and immediately insist a young man move from her reserved window seat. The car was still half empty and I’ll admit my first reaction was that she was being unnecessarily firm about it. But as more passengers boarded at subsequent stops, the logic became clear — by holding her reserved seat from the start, she’d secured her peace for the entire journey. Had she let it go, she’d have been shuffling through a full car looking for something acceptable. It was one of the first lessons of long-distance European rail, and it’s stuck with us ever since. On a long international haul, the small reservation fee is one of the better investments you’ll make. We were glad we’d done it then. We’ve never boarded without one since.
Because we travel carry-on only, relocating to the dining car was as simple as grabbing what was in the overhead rack and walking. If you’ve ever tried to move through a crowded train while managing checked-size luggage, you’ll understand exactly why this matters — and if you want to know how we manage it, that post is here.
White Tablecloths at Altitude
A note on the dining car, because it deserves one. On most modern long-distance routes, what passes for one is a standing counter or a small bar where you order in thirty seconds and carry your coffee back to your seat. The EC 163 Transalpin is different. White tablecloths. Proper tables. A menu printed in German, English, and Italian that reads less like a train service and more like a quiet argument for Austrian hospitality.
We were groggy from the early rise, but the combination of caffeine and Alpine sunlight coming through the windows fixed that quickly. I had a croissant and a coffee — white, as is right, the Austrian way — and Mauricio had tea and the snack sticks with mustard, which disappeared faster than the scenery outside. Once the morning had properly established itself, we ordered a small bottle of Don Grande Cuvée Brut from Sektkellerei Kattus in Vienna and a glass of orange juice each. Mimosas at a white tablecloth table somewhere between Zurich and the Austrian border. There are worse ways to spend a Wednesday morning in October.
The car was warm and nearly empty, and it had a rule we both appreciated immediately: no phone calls. In an era when every train journey comes with someone else’s conversation whether you want it or not, this felt like a small act of civilization. We spent the hours there reflectively — talking through the journey so far, flipping back through photos during the tunnel stretches, watching Switzerland arrange itself outside the window.
The EC 163 also carries an observation car — a dedicated carriage with panoramic windows running nearly floor to ceiling, designed to put as much Alpine landscape in front of you as glass will allow. At some point the scenery made a compelling enough argument that we ventured in to have a look. It is impressive. We noted this, appreciated it fully, and went back to our table. There is something to be said for watching the Alps from a comfortable seat with a cold beverage in hand, and we are firmly in that camp.
There is something else worth saying about train dining cars generally. The ÖBB menu was almost entirely Austrian — Gösser beer from Styria, Grüner Veltliner and Blauer Zweigelt from Niederösterreich, Kattus Sekt from Vienna. Most trains serve food and drink primarily from the country they operate in, and on long multi-country routes you can sometimes track the border crossing by what appears on the menu. It is one of the quiet pleasures of rail travel — an edible introduction to a place before you’ve even arrived.
The EC 163 Transalpin’s Bordrestaurant is one of the better kept secrets on this route — white tablecloths, a proper Austrian menu, and a no-phone-calls policy make it worth seeking out. Head there as soon as you board — commuters won’t be sitting down for breakfast, so it will be nearly empty. On a crowded train, bring your bags with you rather than leaving them at your seat.
The View from the Left
With breakfast finished and the morning properly underway, we turned our full attention to the left-hand window — and Switzerland did not disappoint.
On the Lucerne to Salzburg routing, the left side of the train out of Zurich gives you the best of the scenery — the Zürichsee shoreline, Schloss Sargans, the Arlberg Pass, and the Tyrolean valley descent. It is worth planning around.
At Quarten the mountains drop straight into the Walensee — sheer rock faces plunging into water so still it reads as a mirror — and the effect is magnificent enough that conversation stops mid-sentence. A few minutes later at Flums a waterfall came into view, rushing straight down the mountain face to the valley floor with the complete indifference of something that has been doing this for centuries. Then the valley walls tightened further and Schloss Sargans appeared — a 12th-century fortress perched against the jagged Alpine foothills, its stone towers sharp and solitary against the sky. Unlike our 2016 journey along the Rhine, where castles appeared every few kilometers like punctuation marks, this one stood entirely alone. A sentinel posted at the edge of the known world.
A Postcard of a Country
Then came a moment I had always been curious about: Liechtenstein. It is truly a postcard of a country. Our journey through the entire principality lasted less than thirty minutes — a blink-and-you-miss-it transit that felt like traversing a beautiful private estate rather than a sovereign nation. We watched it go by, this improbable little country, and were across the border into Austria before we’d had time to fully process what we’d seen. Some places you visit. Some places you simply witness, briefly, through glass.
Liechtenstein in Brief
25 kilometers long. 13 kilometers wide. A population of 36,000. One reigning royal family. The last surviving remnant of the Holy Roman Empire. It uses Swiss Francs but issues its own postage stamps. The long-distance international trains pass straight through without stopping. You are in it, and then you are not, in under thirty minutes. It sent 80 soldiers to its last war in 1866 and returned with 81 — apparently having made a friend on the way home. No one knows exactly who he was.
The Scale of Austria
Once across into Austria we marked the crossing the only sensible way — a Gösser from the dining car. The menu had been telling us about this beer for the last two hours. It seemed only right.
The scale of everything shifted at the same time. As we ascended toward St. Anton am Arlberg, the peaks outside became something beyond scenery — jagged summits dusted with the first hints of autumn snow, the kind of scale that makes you stop talking and let your eyes do the work.
The descent on the Austrian side was a series of moments that kept arriving before you’d finished processing the last one. Innerbraz appeared first — a village so perfectly tucked under the mountains that it seems genuinely cut off from the modern world, as though the 21st century simply went around it and kept moving. About ten minutes later the train reached an elevation where, looking out the left window, you found yourself eye-level with the peak of the adjacent mountain. Not below it. Level with it. The sensation is difficult to describe and impossible to photograph adequately. Then Strengen, where the clouds were so low they barely cleared the rooftops — the village sitting in its own private weather system, indifferent to the clear sky visible just a few kilometers back.
“The whole corridor felt like a country that knew exactly how beautiful it was and had decided not to make a fuss about it.”
Somewhere between Innerbraz and Innsbruck — October 2019
The Changing of the Guard
I had done my research before we left home. Our connection in Innsbruck was six minutes — enough time to disembark, navigate an unfamiliar station, find the correct platform, and board the Railjet Express 563 before it departed. Trains to Salzburg run roughly every hour, so missing it wasn’t catastrophic, just inconvenient. But by the time we pulled into Innsbruck after three and a half hours of watching that scenery build, I was braced for a sprint.
Instead, we stepped off the EuroCity onto the platform and found the Railjet sitting directly opposite, close enough to touch, waiting with the quiet patience of something that had been there all along. No sprint, no frantic signage-reading, no near-miss. We simply stepped off one train, walked a few yards of open platform, and boarded the other. It felt less like a connection and more like a changing of the guard — one train handing us off to the next with a silent, professional nod.
If you are planning this journey, book it as two separate reservations: Lucerne to Innsbruck, and Innsbruck to Salzburg. The six-minute connection is manageable — as we discovered, the trains are often platform-to-platform — but knowing the next train departs at 1:15 PM removes all anxiety from the equation.
Settled into our new seats for the final two-hour push to Salzburg, the rugged Arlberg gave way to the rolling emerald hills of the Salzkammergut. The longest leg of our Odyssey was nearly over, and we hadn’t broken a sweat.
By the time we pulled into Salzburg Hauptbahnhof, the six and a half hours felt like they had passed in a single breath. The city was waiting. What happened next is Part 5 — including why we wish we had spent every last Swiss Franc before we boarded.
Next Stop: Salzburg
The currency changes, a stranger extends an act of trust, and an anniversary unfolds in a hotel that has been welcoming guests since 1407. Part 5 is waiting.
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