About this journey

Saint Gingolph station sits precisely on the border between Switzerland and France, with no rail service continuing on the French side. From here, the line — the Saint-Gingolph–Saint-Maurice line — carries an hourly Regio service northeast through the canton of Valais toward the Rhône valley and, ultimately, to Brig.

Brig station has been a significant junction since it first opened on 18 June 1878 as the eastern terminus of the Simplon Railway. The opening of the Simplon Tunnel in 1906 pushed that route southeast to Domodossola in Italy, and Brig remains immediately adjacent to the tunnel's northern portal. A second standard-gauge axis arrived in 1913 with the Lötschberg railway line, linking Brig with Bern via the Lötschberg Tunnel; that mountain route was largely supplemented in 2007 when the Lötschberg Base Tunnel opened as part of the New Railway Link through the Alps. Today Brig serves EuroCity trains on the Milano Centrale–Genève-Cornavin corridor alongside regional services, and two metre-gauge lines depart from the adjacent Brig Bahnhofplatz station. The journey from a quiet border halt to this layered Alpine crossroads traces more than a century of Swiss railway history in a single run through the Valais.