Mont-Blanc Express

The last train up the Trient valley leaves Martigny at 23:22, and it does not run unless somebody asks for it. There is a form on the railway's own website: fill it in at least half an hour before departure and the train is made ready. On Friday and Saturday nights a second one follows at 00:16. Both of them climb and neither comes back down, because the point of them is not sightseeing. It is getting people home to Salvan, Les Marécottes, Le Trétien and Finhaut, the four villages on the shelf above the gorge that this line has served since 1906.

By day the same railway is the Mont-Blanc Express: thirty-eight kilometres of metre gauge from the orchards of the Rhône valley to Chamonix, eighteen kilometres of it in Switzerland and twenty in France, with a stream called the Eau Noire for a border. It leaves Martigny on the flat, bites into a rack at Vernayaz and climbs two hundred metres in every thousand, then runs for the best part of an hour along a ledge above the Trient, through avalanche galleries and tunnels driven by hand and explosive, to the last Swiss station at Le Châtelard-Frontière.

Two companies work it — TMR on the Swiss side, SNCF on the French — and the two halves were designed to fit one another so precisely that a hundred and twenty years later the Swiss track still carries the mark of a French decision. Thirteen through journeys run from Martigny each day and fourteen come back, seven days a week, and the ride takes an hour and a half.

The Mont-Blanc Express starts from a platform, a shelter and two tracks at the side of Martigny's main-line station, where the Simplon expresses from Lausanne and Brig come and go on standard gauge a few metres away. For four kilometres nothing happens. The line runs west between the cantonal road and the main line, through the apricot orchards of the Rhône valley, calling at Les Fumeaux, and reaches Vernayaz at 457 metres on ground that is almost flat. Vernayaz is where the railway actually lives: twelve tracks, the workshops, and the control room from which one signaller has worked the whole line by computer since September 2008.

Immediately beyond the station the track passes under the road, crosses the Trient on an iron bowstring bridge, picks up current from a third rail laid beside the running rails — and starts to climb at two hundred millimetres in the metre.

The rack that clears a rail that is no longer there

The rack section is about two and a half kilometres long, from just past Vernayaz to the woods below Salvan, and it is a Strub rack: a single toothed bar between the rails, named for the engineer Strub, who was one of the four concessionaires granted this railway on 20 December 1901. What is unusual about it is not the system but the height. The bar sits 138 millimetres above the top of the running rails, which is a good deal higher than a rack needs to be.

It is set that high because of France. When the line beyond the border was built, every stretch steeper than seventy millimetres in the metre carried a central rail that the trains gripped with brake jaws on the way down, and that rail stood 60 millimetres above the railhead. Swiss railcars were expected to run through onto French metals, so their cog wheels had to clear it — and the simplest way to guarantee that was to lift the Swiss rack out of its way. The French braking rail was taken up in the 1980s. The Swiss rack is still exactly where the French put it.

At Le Pontet the teeth run out, the noise stops, and the train arrives at Salvan at 934 metres having gained nearly five hundred metres since the bridge.

An hour on the ledge

From Salvan the gradients ease to a mere seventy in the thousand and the line settles into what it does best. It calls at Les Marécottes and at the request stop of La Médettaz, crosses the Triège on a single masonry arch of 35.4 metres that stands 43 metres above the torrent, and reaches Le Trétien. Beyond it the railway is cut into the side of the valley for the rest of the Swiss half. There are twelve tunnels on this line, adding up to 1,945 metres, and the two biggest structures of their kinds come one after the other along here: the Lachat, longest tunnel on the railway at 580 metres, and the Lavancher, longest of its avalanche galleries at 589. The tunnels were driven by hand and explosive between 1902 and 1906.

There are also thirteen avalanche galleries, more than a kilometre of them in total. Only four were built with the line. The others date from 1936 to 1938, and they exist because of a decision about the calendar rather than about engineering: for its first twenty-five years the railway shut for the winter, and the galleries are what it took to keep it open once it stopped shutting.

Finhaut, at 1,224 metres, is the highest station on the Swiss side, and the summit of the Swiss half, at 1,228 metres, is close by. After it comes the Torrents viaduct, another 35.4-metre arch, thrown across an avalanche couloir on a gradient of seventy in the thousand and carrying almost no water at all.

The frontier at the Eau Noire

The train now descends. Le Châtelard VS has an SBB power station beside the tracks and, across the road, the bottom station of the funicular up to the Émosson dam. Then the six masonry arches of the Scierie viaduct, and Le Châtelard-Frontière at 1,116 metres, a chalet-fronted station with the name painted along the platform canopy and a customs post behind it.

The border itself is about three hundred metres further on: a single arch over the Eau Noire, a stream that gives no sign of being an international frontier. The Swiss company has been running trains across it since 1 July 1908, when it took over the working of the last three kilometres of the French line as far as Vallorcine and paid the French company a third of the takings for the privilege. Since the timetable change of 2008 the arrangement has grown: TMR crews and TMR railcars work the whole way to Vallorcine on SNCF's behalf.

The half with no rack

France answered the same mountain a different way. When the line from Le Fayet to Chamonix was designed in the 1890s it was to have four and a half kilometres of rack, and then in 1897 its engineers took the decision that shaped everything after it: build two hydroelectric stations of your own, power every axle of every train, and dispense with the rack entirely. The result is a railway that climbs ninety millimetres in the metre on plain adhesion for two thousand metres between Servoz and Les Houches, which is as steep as an unassisted railway anywhere is asked to climb.

The other thing the French half has is the Montets tunnel, 1,882 metres long, containing the highest point the Mont-Blanc Express reaches at 1,386 metres. It was appalling to build. In May 1907 water was coming in at 40,500 litres a minute; the contractor went bankrupt; nearly eight thousand tonnes of cement were injected to seal it, most of which simply washed away; eight men were killed. It was holed through at the end of October 1907.

From the beginning it had a footway alongside the track, so that Vallorcine would not be sealed off whenever the pass above was impassable. In 1984 that footway was turned into a carriageway two and a half metres wide, and cars began using the tunnel in alternation with trains whenever the col des Montets road closed. The rebuilding of 2012 to 2014 widened it to nearly four metres and set the rails flush into the surface, tramway fashion. Traffic lights and a barrier stand at the portal.

Changing at Vallorcine

Between 1988 and 1994 the Swiss and French companies designed a train together for exactly this line — the Z800, rack-fitted, third-rail and overhead, five sets shared between them, in service from 1997 and able to run from Le Fayet to Martigny without anyone leaving their seat. Today the timetable does not use them that way: every through journey changes at Vallorcine, with five minutes to walk across the platform, and the Swiss train goes back the way it came.

Newer stock is arriving. TMR and SNCF ordered seven Stadler Beh 4/8 units together, 230 seats apiece; the first was delivered in April 2025, and on 2 July 2026 the operator announced that three of them — named Le Rhône, Le Trient and Le Triège, after the three rivers the line crosses or follows — had entered service on the Swiss section from 22 June. Four more are due on the French side in September.

Whatever is standing at Vallorcine, the last half-hour is the one people come for. The train climbs past Le Buet to Montroc, runs through the Montets tunnel, and comes out onto the Arve with the Aiguilles Rouges on one side and the Mont Blanc massif on the other. It calls at Argentière, at Les Tines and at Les Praz, and finishes on three platform tracks at Chamonix, with a footbridge at the end of them to the rack railway that goes up to the Mer de Glace.

The Mont-Blanc Express runs every day of the year, on one timetable valid from 14 December 2025 to 12 December 2026. It is a clockface service: after the first train of the morning, departures from Martigny are at xx:14 and departures from Chamonix at xx:28, hour after hour until the evening.

Every through journey involves a change of train at Vallorcine, the first station inside France, where the two halves meet. The Swiss half is worked by TMR as train R 85, Martigny to Vallorcine; the French half by SNCF as TER P52, Vallorcine to Chamonix and on to Saint-Gervais-les-Bains-Le Fayet. The connection is five minutes and the two trains use the same platform face.

The pattern below was queried against the Swiss national timetable database in August 2026 for a Thursday, a Saturday and a Sunday in September 2026, and corroborated against the operator's own printed table (route 132). All three days returned the same service.

Martigny to Chamonix

Thirteen through journeys: 06:56, then 08:14 and hourly at xx:14 until 19:14. The whole run takes 1 hour 31 minutes — the 06:56 is the exception, because it waits twenty-one minutes at Vallorcine for the first French train of the day. There is no departure at 07:14.

Chamonix to Martigny

Fourteen through journeys: hourly at xx:28 from 07:28 to 20:28. Westbound the run takes 1 hour 41 minutes, ten minutes longer than eastbound, because a rack descent is worked more slowly than a rack climb: Salvan to Vernayaz takes fourteen minutes down and ten minutes up.

The night trains, which run only if you ask

Two late departures from Martigny — 23:22 every night, and 00:16 on Friday and Saturday nights — are marked in the operator's timetable circule uniquement sur réservation, and they behave accordingly. They run uphill only, as far as Le Châtelard-Frontière, and they run only if somebody has booked. The booking form is on the operator's website; it must be sent at least thirty minutes before departure and no earlier than thirty days ahead, and the cut-off is 23:00 for the 23:22 and midnight for the 00:16. ⚠️ The operator is not quite consistent with itself about that second one: the national timetable database and the booking form's own dropdown both say 00:16, while the prose on two of the operator's pages says 00:17. Book it and be on the platform for 00:15. The 22:22 from Martigny, which reaches Le Châtelard-Frontière at 23:05 every night of the week, is an ordinary train and needs no reservation.

Engineering work on the French half in autumn 2026

Between 28 September and 6 November 2026 the timetable database returns a replacement bus rather than a train for the Vallorcine–Chamonix leg, at 09:12 rather than 09:10 and calling at Les Iles Grassonet instead of Montroc-le-Planet and La Joux. Trains are shown running again from 7 November. The Swiss half is unaffected throughout. ⚠️ The French timetable data available through the Swiss database stops after 8 November 2026 — a date horizon on the SNCF side, not a closure — so anything later than that is worth checking with the operator before travelling.

Connections at each end

Martigny is on the SBB Simplon main line, with hourly trains to Lausanne and Geneva one way and Sion, Brig and the Lötschberg the other, and it is also the terminus of TMR's second line, the Saint-Bernard Express to Orsières and Le Châble. Chamonix has the Montenvers rack railway to the Mer de Glace, reached by a footbridge from the platform ends, and the Aiguille du Midi and Brévent cable cars. Staying on the TER past Chamonix brings you to Saint-Gervais-les-Bains-Le Fayet in another 45 minutes, where the Tramway du Mont-Blanc climbs towards the Nid d'Aigle and the standard-gauge network begins.

Timetable: Transports de Martigny et Régions route 132 and the Swiss national timetable database, checked August 2026.

Two companies, two currencies and two national fare systems meet on this line, and the tidiest way through them is the operator's own Day Pass Martigny–Chamonix: CHF 40 for an adult, CHF 25 for children 6 to 16 and Swiss Half Fare Card holders, valid in both directions for a day. It is easiest to buy in Switzerland, from any Mont-Blanc Express machine or the TMR Voyages counter at Martigny. For a shorter hop — Salvan for the gorge walk, or Finhaut — an ordinary return costs less.

Anyone staying a night in the Chamonix valley is entitled to the carte d'hôte, handed over free on arrival, and it carries free travel between Servoz and Vallorcine. The two night trains, at 23:22 and 00:16 from Martigny, run only if somebody has booked through a form on the operator's site at least thirty minutes ahead — a request to run the train rather than a ticket. Fares checked August 2026.

A rail pass is unusually easy to reason about on this line, because the operator publishes the answer itself, and the answer follows the frontier exactly.

On the Swiss half, Martigny to Le Châtelard-Frontière, the operator accepts the GA travelcard, the Half Fare Card, the Swiss Travel Pass and the SBB Day Travel Card. It is treated as an ordinary piece of the Swiss network rather than as a mountain railway with a house tariff, so those passes cover it outright, rack section and all.

On the French half, Chamonix to Le Châtelard-Frontière, none of those is worth anything. What works there is the Chamonix guest card, the carte d'hôte, which anyone staying a night in the valley receives from their accommodation and which carries free travel between Servoz and Vallorcine.

For the whole journey, Martigny to Chamonix, the operator's list is short: its own Day Pass Mont-Blanc Express, Interrail, Eurail, or a rail pass covering both countries.

The pass trap at the border

⛔ An Interrail or Eurail One Country Pass is no use here. Interrail's own conditions are explicit: a One Country Pass cannot be used to travel to or from the country it covers, and it is valid only with the participating operators inside that country. A Switzerland pass will therefore take you as far as Le Châtelard-Frontière and stop; a France pass will bring you up to Vallorcine and stop. To ride the line end to end on an Interrail or Eurail pass you need a Global Pass, which covers both sides.

⭐ If you are travelling as far as Chamonix and staying there, the cheapest combination is often a Swiss pass or a Swiss ticket to the frontier and then the guest card from your hotel — which costs nothing — rather than a product that tries to cover both halves at once.

Reservations

There is no compulsory seat reservation for individual travellers and no panorama supplement in either country — a pass or a ticket is enough on any daytime train. The operator's timetable asks only that groups of eight or more book in advance, on +41 27 721 68 40, and notes that capacity for groups is limited. The other booking on the whole line is the free request form for the two night departures from Martigny.

Pass validity from Transports de Martigny et Régions, the Chamonix-Mont-Blanc tourist office and Interrail's published pass conditions, checked August 2026.

An hour and a half is short enough to ride in one go and short enough to break wherever you like, and the hourly clockface timetable makes that painless: get off, and the next train is sixty minutes behind. The day pass allows as many stops as you can fit into a day.

The seven places below run west to east, in the order a train from Martigny reaches them. Five are in Switzerland and two in France, and the change at the border is not subtle — the Swiss half is a gorge with villages perched on shelves above it, and the French half opens into the Chamonix valley with the Mont Blanc massif standing over the whole of it.

Ninety minutes each way makes this a comfortable day out from Martigny or from Chamonix, but the valley in between is worth a night, and staying on the French side has a practical advantage: the guest card your accommodation hands you covers the train from Servoz to Vallorcine for nothing.

The four houses below stand at the Swiss end, at two points along the line and at the French end. Every one of them is within a few minutes of a platform, and one of them is named after the station it sits beside.

Prices and star ratings are not listed here because we have not checked them. What is described is what each house says about itself and what can be verified about where it stands.