About this journey

Chur station, opened on 30 June 1858, is the principal railway junction of the canton of Graubünden and one of Switzerland's most distinctive interchange points: SBB standard-gauge trains from Zürich arrive on one set of tracks while the Rhaetian Railway's metre-gauge network begins on another. That coexistence was not voluntary — the Federal Council required the Rhaetian Railway to share the existing station rather than build its own terminus. The RhB opened its narrow-gauge line between Landquart and Thusis in 1896, with the first 13.68 kilometres running parallel to the existing standard-gauge route between Landquart and Chur.

From Chur, the metre-gauge line follows the upper Rhine valley westward through Fahrplanfeld 920 toward Disentis/Mustér, a journey that also carries the Glacier Express on its tourist services between Zermatt and St. Moritz. Disentis/Mustér station sits where the roads of the Oberalp and Lukmanier passes converge, making the town a crossing point between central Switzerland and the south for centuries. Disentis Abbey, whose present baroque complex dates from 1696 to 1712, stands above the valley as a visible marker of that history, founded around 720 AD as a cultural and political centre of the region. The station itself is a genuine railway junction: the western terminus of the Rhaetian Railway from Chur meets the eastern terminus of the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn line from Brig via Andermatt, so a journey that begins at a gauge-change junction in Chur ends at an operator-change junction in the upper Rhine valley.