Today let’s visit Switzerland, via the prompt word SWISS.

Swiss Alps, Swiss chalets, Swiss cheese, Swiss watches, the Swiss Family Robinson — not to forget fellow blogger, Mrs AngloSwiss, who’s been responding faithfully to writing prompts for a number of years. What does SWISS say to you?

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2020/04/19/rdp-sunday-swiss/

I don’t know anything about Swiss watches but I’m a big fan of the other things mentioned, including Mrs Anglo Swiss and let us not forget chocolate.

I’ve never visited Switzerland but I would have liked to. I don’t think it will happen now unless I win lotto before I am too old to travel.

My interest came from books I read as a child, first Heidi, given to me by my mother when I was about seven years old. Later as a young teenager I read several of the Chalet School stories by Elinor Brent Dyer. Another particular favourite was “The Vine Clad Hill” by Mabel Esther Allan. The attraction of these books was partly their setting. In the first Chalet School books the school was located in Austria but in later ones there were stories set in Switzerland as well as England. Anyway I loved reading about the beautiful scenery and the travels of the characters in the stories.

That brings me, unsurprisingly for anyone who knows me, to my second point. Switzerland has some fantastic trains. My story books introduced me to various train journeys from England to the Swiss alps and I longed to do that myself. I even had a rail guide to Europe and would pick out the journeys that I wanted to take, my favourite idea was always to travel from Amsterdam to Zurich. I preferred that route to going via France because I wanted to slip in a visit to the tulip farms as well. Apart from that deviation I wanted to be like the girl in “The Vine Clad Hill”having breakfast in Basel while waiting for a connection and travelling through the Gotthard Tunnel.

Switzerland has many scenic rail journeys and one of its most unusual trains must be The Glacier Express. I would loved to have been on that.

I have visited Switzerland in miniature. There used to be a model railway exhibition in Hobart called Alpenrail. It was built by a father and son who had come to Tasmania from Switzerland and we visited it a few times before it closed a few years ago. The owner told us that they had tried to make it look as realistic as possible. We have a video that we bought on our first visit more than twenty years ago that shows some of the building phase as well as the railway. Of course I have videos of real trains too and love to watch television programs and YouTube films about railways in Switzerland. I guess that is about as close as I will ever get.

I have included a piece of film taken by an enthusiast at Alpenrail not long before it closed. Be warned that it is quite long if you are not a model train person.