About this journey

Lucerne station sits at the heart of one of Switzerland's busiest rail junctions, a terminal opened on 5 February 1991 whose concourse was designed by Santiago Calatrava, replacing a predecessor destroyed by fire. The station's seven island platforms and fourteen tracks, numbered 2 through 15, handle a convergence of standard-gauge SBB services and the metre-gauge Brünig railway alongside them. Electrification here dates to 1922, when the tracks were wired together with the line from Olten, and the infrastructure has continued to evolve: in late 2012 a new tunnel opened between Kriens Mattenhof and the station approaches on the Brünig line, replacing a surface alignment to allow double track.

From Lucerne, the S-Bahn S1 line runs northeast, connecting the city with Baar as part of a half-hourly service that extends further to Sursee. Baar itself is served by the standard-gauge Thalwil–Arth-Goldau line of Swiss Federal Railways, with the S1 calling at Baar Neufeld station every fifteen minutes. The journey moves from the layered complexity of a major Swiss terminal — where metre-gauge and standard-gauge tracks share the same concourse and a proposed new 3.5-kilometre tunnel under Lake Lucerne points toward a future underground expansion — to the quieter rhythm of a suburban halt in the Zug canton.