Tickets from CT to Gimmelwald

PT, a couple of things. First, www.bahn.de is a great website for showing train routing in Europe. They are the best. However, you don't see fares for Italy to Switzerland and, you definitely can't buy the tickets on the German website. Second, the best place to buy these tickets is on www.trenitalia.com, the Italian train website. However, the Italian system cannot see Interlaken or any place inside the Lauterbrunnen valley on their system. The best you can do on the Italian system is to purchase a ticket from Vernazza to Spiez. The Trenitalia website can do this. Once you are in Spiez, walk into the station and purchase the rest of your journey to Gimmelwald. You are an hour away and everything will be local from Spiez. You will have tickets for Spiez/Interlaken Ost, Interlaken Ost/Lauterbrunnen, a bus from across the street from the Lauterbrunnen train station to the Stechelberg gondola station and finally, a ticket for the gondola up to Gimmelwald. Sounds like a lot but you'll love the whole thing. Very scenic and easy to do.

Third, Trenitalia refreshes their train schedules twice yearly. Once in mid-June and once in mid-December. Our experience on this website is that they are notoriously tardy in getting the schedules online for a 120-day look. They just don't get the schedules up there on time. Right now, I don't think that you are able to purchase these tickets on Trenitalia and unfortunately, you most likely can't get the tickets anywhere else until all of the schedules are posted. I've checked the Swiss train website www.sbb.ch and they won't show schedules either from the CT. Just keep checking daily until the schedules appear. Hopefully, you can get the nice 22Euro Smart fare on Trenitalia from Milano Centrale to Spiez.

PT,

I've made that trip several times, and Larry provided an excellent description of the route to follow. Since you appear to be travelling on a Monday, if you check the DB schedules for next Monday you should see the options.

There's no need to leave from La Spezia, since that's in the opposite direction to where you want to go. I normally depart from Monterosso, and you may also find that the easiest solution since the 06:55 departure to Spiez only has one change in Milano (although the layover is a bit long). Note that both of those trains will be "premium" trains so reservations will be compulsory. You could also use a departure from Vernazza at 07:32, which gets you to Spiez at the same time as the departure from Monterosso but there's one extra change in Levanto.

You can easily buy tickets for whichever trip you decide to use at the station in Monterosso and possibly Vernazza (the cost will be slightly higher than pre-purchasing), although as mentioned they will only be able to sell tickets as far as Spiez. When you arrive at Spiez, it only takes a couple of minutes to go inside and buy tickets to Gimmelwald, which will include all modes of transportation.

Yes, there usually is a delay for Italy and several other countries (e.g. Spain, eastern Europe) to release their full summer schedules online. Right now, look at schedules through June 14 only and expect to see very similar choices later. DB will load Italy's summer regional-train schedule when Italy reports it to them, but not usually until after the June 15 schedule change. There's no need to book the tickets yet, and other travelers are in the same boat.

Thank you for all of the replies. I've noticed some of the schedule coming online, for example, Monterosso to Spiez (and thus, Gimmelwald). However, we are traveling to Vernazza from Pisa on June 21st, and that schedule isn't online yet. I've tried Pisa to La Spezia and it's not online yet. So, I guess things are slowly coming on. The good news is that if service is provided in the spring, there's no doubt it will be provided in June.

If anything, there will be more options during the summer. Some times may change by a few minutes.