Rhaetian Railway in the Albula Bernina Landscapes

Title: Exploring the Rhaetian Railway in the Albula and Bernina Landscapes: A Comprehensive Guide for Tourists

A regular commuter train, not a special charter, will carry you over a 65-meter viaduct and through three spiral tunnels blasted into a mountainside, and you can ride the whole thing for the price of a normal rail ticket. That is the part most guides bury: while the famous panoramic Bernina Express gets all the marketing, the UNESCO-listed engineering underneath it works exactly the same way on the ordinary regional trains, minus the reserved seat fee.

What is actually protected here

UNESCO inscribed the Albula and Bernina lines of the Rhaetian Railway in 2008, not for a single building but for a 122-kilometer stretch of working track between Thusis and Tirano, Italy, crossing 196 bridges and 55 tunnels through the Swiss Alps. It is one of only a handful of railways worldwide recognized for outstanding universal value, cited for how the line resolves an extreme technical problem, gaining and losing enormous elevation across short horizontal distances, without resorting to rack-and-pinion track, using only adhesion traction on curves as tight as 100 meters radius. The line has operated continuously since construction in the early 20th century and remains full public transport, not a museum piece run for tourists a few times a year.

The Albula line: Thusis to St. Moritz

This is the older and, engineering-wise, more astonishing of the two sections. Trains climb from Thusis through Tiefencastel, Filisur, and Bergun before tackling the single hardest stretch on the entire network: a 417-meter elevation gain between Bergun and Preda across just 6.5 kilometers as the crow flies. To manage that without impossibly steep grades, the builders threaded the line through three spiral tunnels and several curved viaducts, stretching the actual track length to about 12 kilometers. Preda, at 1,789 meters, is the highest stop on the Albula line. From there the route runs through the Albula Tunnel, over 5 kilometers long and for decades one of the longest rail tunnels in the world at the time it opened, before descending into the Engadin valley toward Samedan and St. Moritz.

The Bernina line: St. Moritz to Tirano

This half is more famous because it is entirely open-air, with no long summit tunnel, meaning constant unobstructed views the whole way. It climbs out of St. Moritz through Pontresina, past the Morteratsch glacier, which is retreating fast enough that even a single return visit years apart shows a visible difference, and up to Ospizio Bernina, the line’s true summit at 2,253 meters, the highest point reached by any adhesion railway crossing the Alps. From there it drops rapidly toward Poschiavo, a Italian-speaking Swiss village with a distinct character from the German and Romansh towns further north, and then performs its signature move: the Brusio spiral viaduct, a full 360-degree loop of open track built purely to lose altitude gradually before the final descent into Tirano. The line crosses the border into Italy without a change of train, ending among palm trees and vineyards that feel like a different climate entirely from the glaciers an hour earlier.

Riding it: Bernina Express versus regional trains

The Bernina Express is the panoramic service with oversized windows and a dedicated observation-car feel, and it requires a mandatory seat reservation on top of your normal ticket: roughly 36 Swiss francs in high season, running from early May to late October, and slightly less outside that window. The regional trains cover the identical UNESCO-listed track, same viaducts, same spiral tunnels, with no reservation required and no supplement, just your normal point-to-point fare or a Swiss Travel Pass. The tradeoff is that regional trains have standard windows rather than the express’s panoramic glass roof, and no onboard narration. If budget matters more than the extra glass, take the regional service; the Brusio spiral looks the same either way.

When to go

Late June through September gives the clearest passes and lets you actually see the Morteratsch glacier without snow cover obscuring it, though this is also peak crowding on the reserved panoramic cars, so book seats well ahead. Winter running, roughly December through March, turns the same route into a snow-covered spectacle and is when the Bernina line earns comparisons to a ski-country postcard, but some connecting mountain roads and hiking access points close seasonally. Shoulder months, especially October, combine good weather odds with thinner crowds and are underrated for this trip.

A gotcha worth knowing

Panoramic-car window seats sell out weeks ahead in July and August, and showing up at the station without a reservation during high season for the express service means you may be turned away from that particular train even with a valid rail pass, since the reservation is a separate, capacity-limited product. If your dates are fixed, book the seat reservation as early as your travel plans allow, and treat the regional train as your reliable backup rather than a downgrade.