Bernina Express

loretta, IMHO, it will NOT be possible to make a day trip on the Bernina Express while you're staying in Nice. The rail trip from Nice to Tirano (the starting point of the Bernina Express) will be a minimum of about 7.5 hours! If you took the 14:04 departure of the B.E., you wouldn't arrive in Chur until 18:27, so there's NO WAY you'd get back to Nice that day. Travel time to the Berner Oberland or Chamonix (also great places to see the Alps) would be prohibitively long, so I'm not sure there's an easy way to see the Alps. Good luck and happy travels!

You need to look at a map. You may be able to get to the French Alps for a day (if this is something you have to check off a bucket list), but the Swiss Alps are much too far away from Nice. If setting foot in Switzerland for a day is a bucket list item, but you don't need to see the Alps, there are TGV trains from Nice to Geneva taking 4 hours, and from there you could see other other sites on Lake Geneva (Lausanne, Montreux, Chateau de Chillon). I've never been to Geneva, but Rick Steves is not the only one who says that while the other cities in this region are very interesting, Geneva itself is not. If you really want to see the Swiss Alps, you'll have to take time out of your Nice days and allow for at least one overnight in Switzerland.

Three years ago my husband and I did the William Tell boat/train experience out of Lucerne and ended in Lugano, Switzerland. We then used Lugano as our base for taking day trips to Milan, Lake Como and Lake Maggiorre. We stayed there for four or five days. Then when we left Lugano, we took the Bernina Express out of Lugano. We started with a long bus ride around Lake Maggiorre. Then a train through the Alps. We changed trains and eventualy got to our Zurich destination. Both the William Tell and the Bernina Express were awesome. We did the trips in June.