Lake Como from Switzerland

From Pontresina you would take the scenic Bernina Express route (not necessarily the designated Bernina Espress train, any regional train will do) to Tirano at the Italian border. There you will change to an Italian regional train that goes directly to Varenna in 1.5 hours. There is only the one train change for this journey, at Tirano.

Having trouble finding the train connection at Tirana on any schedule of trenitalia or SBB. There was a thread about this several months ago that indicated trenitalia accidentally failed to program this in their schedule software. Can anyone confirm this? If I ask SBB to get me from St Moritz to Varenna, they show a bus over the Malojapass to Chiavenna and taking a regional train from there.

Sam, on SBB, put in St. Moritz as the start, Varenna-Esino as the end, and enter Pontresina under " via". It will then show you the train route with a single change at Tirano. You can depart St. moritz at 9:45 or 12:45 and arrive at Varenna 4+ hours later. This route takes over hour longer than the bus option, so the efficient Swiss site won't show it unless you ask it to by using the "via" option. You can also see the train schedule between Tirano and on Trenitalia website by starting with fsitaliane.it. It will show departures from Tirano to Varenna every two hours, at 11:10, 13:10, 15:10, etc., the same as shown on SBB. It will switch you to Trenitalia, BTW but I did not check what happens if you start there.

OK, I checked Trenitalia and it will not show Tirano to Varenna-Esino. No idea why. But you can get to FS Italiane by clicking on "FS Home" in the upper left corner of the Trenitalia site. It is in Italian, but easy to figure out as the format is just like Trenitalia. Put in Tirano and Varenna ( you don't even have to say Varenna-Esino), a date within the next week ( it is a regional train) time, and hit "Invia" ( send). Then you will see the schedule and cost (6euros for 2d class).

Having trouble finding the train connection at Tirana on anis y schedule of trenitalia or SBB That may be because Tirana (with an A at the end) is the capital of the country of Albania. Tirano (with an O) is what you are looking for...

No Nigel, just mistak bu fumble fingured typist.