About this journey

Zürich Hauptbahnhof, where this journey begins, handles up to 2,915 trains per day — the busiest station in Switzerland and one of the busiest in the world. Its railway history reaches back to 9 August 1847, when the Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn, the first railway built entirely within Switzerland, opened here linking Zürich with Baden. The tracks laid that year were originally 1,600 mm gauge; by 1853 they had been regauged to the standard 1,435 mm still in use today.

From Zürich HB the train works south-west across lines 631, 462, and 461 toward the shores of Lake Lucerne. The route concludes at Luzern station, itself a terminus whose origins go back to 1856, when it served as the end of the Schweizerische Centralbahn main line from Olten and Basel, placed directly beside the lake to connect with boat services. The current station concourse was designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened on 5 February 1991; the landing stages of the Schifffahrtsgesellschaft des Vierwaldstättersees lie immediately in front, offering a direct rail-to-lake interchange. A half-hourly InterRegio service links the two cities, and a future proposal calls for a 3.5-kilometre tunnel from Ebikon under the lake to a new underground terminal to expand capacity further.