The Jungfrau region, Switzerland's high railways and the Eiger's north face

From the lakeside at Interlaken, look south and three mountains fill the end of the valley: the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau, the Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden, standing shoulder to shoulder in snow and rock. They are the reason the Bernese Oberland became one of the first great tourist landscapes in the world, and for well over a century the most popular way to see them has been by train.

That is the special pleasure of the Jungfrau region. Elsewhere in the Alps you need a car, a pair of boots and a good deal of time; here, a network of mountain railways climbs from the valleys to the high pastures and beyond, and you can sit at a window with a hot drink and be carried into the heart of the mountains.

Up to the Jungfraujoch

The trains run in stages. From Interlaken, one line climbs to Grindelwald, a village of chalets beneath the Eiger; another to Lauterbrunnen, at the foot of its cliff-walled valley. From both sides, rack railways climb again to Kleine Scheidegg, a pass with a station and a few old hotels set right beneath the Eiger's north face.

At Kleine Scheidegg, the most remarkable of the lines begins. The Jungfraubahn, opened to the Jungfraujoch on 1 August 1912, climbs from the pass into a tunnel about seven kilometres long, bored through the Eiger and the Mönch, and emerges at the Jungfraujoch, the saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau. Its station, at 3,454 metres, is the highest railway station in Europe.

On the way up, the train stops inside the mountain at a station where windows have been cut in the rock of the north face itself. Passengers step out and look down from inside the wall that climbers have spent their lives trying to get up. At the top there is a terrace, an ice palace cut into the glacier and, on a clear day, the Aletsch Glacier, a great river of ice, running away to the south.

The altitude is real. People who climb from the lakes to the Jungfraujoch in a morning sometimes feel it, and it is wise to go slowly at the top.

The north face

The Eiger's north face, the Nordwand, is one of the most famous walls in mountaineering: about 1,800 metres of crumbling rock and ice, facing north, in shadow, prone to sudden storms. Through the 1930s it killed climber after climber, while crowds watched through telescopes from the hotels at Kleine Scheidegg. The first ascent came in July 1938, when two Germans and two Austrians, Anderl Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek, joined forces on the face and reached the summit on 24 July after more than three days of climbing. Harrer later wrote the best-known book about the face, The White Spider.

You do not need to climb it to feel its presence. Walk the path from Kleine Scheidegg down towards Alpiglen, directly beneath the face, and it fills half the sky.

The valley of waterfalls

On the other side of the ridge, the Lauterbrunnen valley is one of the Alps' great sights in its own right: a deep, flat-floored glacial trough with sheer rock walls, down which, by the local count, seventy-two waterfalls pour. The best known, the Staubbach Falls, drops almost 300 metres from an overhanging cliff above the village, and in a breeze it turns to spray before it reaches the ground. Further up the valley, the Trümmelbach Falls carry the meltwater of the glaciers above through a series of gorges inside the mountain, reached by a lift. Cable cars climb from the valley to the car-free villages on the terraces above, Mürren among them, and from there to the summit of the Schilthorn.

Holidays that go there

Just You's six-night Switzerland's Scenic Railways and Alpine Winter Wonders, for solo travellers, has Zurich, Interlaken, Zweisimmen, Bern, Lucerne, Vitznau and Rigi Kulm, Brig, Chur, Grindelwald, Eigergletscher and the Jungfraujoch in its list: a journey around Switzerland's railways that reaches the top.

Travelsphere's six-night Winter in Switzerland has Zurich, Kleine Scheidegg, Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen and Interlaken in its places, along with Montreux, Chillon Castle, the Maison Cailler chocolate factory, Gruyères and Lucerne. Its sister trip, the seven-night The Best of Switzerland, goes from Zurich by way of Davos, Filisur and Tirano, across the border in Italy, to Brig and Interlaken, with the Trümmelbach Falls, the Schilthorn, Birg and Mürren, Lake Thun and Spiez.

The railways run all year, and each season has its own case. In winter the region is a ski area, the villages are deep in snow and the views from the trains are at their sharpest on cold, clear days. In summer the high pastures are green, the paths are open and the waterfalls are at their fullest. Either way, watch the weather: on a cloudy day the Jungfraujoch is a long way to go to look at the inside of a cloud, and the webcams at the stations are worth checking before you buy a ticket.