A Ride on the Cheese Train in Switzerland
The cheese demonstration portion of the fondue lunch, a part of The Cheese Train experience. Chateaux d’Oex, Switzerland. June 17, 2022.
Unlike The Chocolate Train offered by the same company, which is fairly well structured and guided throughout the experience (and likely better for families with young children), The Cheese Train takes a bit more of a laissez-faire approach to your tour.
We didn’t get much more than the very perfunctory information we received on the tour company’s website—and that’s even when we went to the company’s ticket office in Montreux the morning of the tour. With The Cheese Train, you receive a few pieces of paper and you’re on your own when it comes to puzzling them through.
Many of us love having a lot of flexibility—me included—but I prefer to know what to expect as well. If that’s you, too, here’s what you want to know about The Cheese Train and how to coordinate your experience.
The Train to Chateaux d’Oex
As the description on the tour’s website gave me very little detail, I didn’t quite understand what it meant that we could take any of the Belle Epoque trains the company offered up to the Chateaux d’Oex destination spot for the cheese-making demonstration.
Why would you want to go ahead of time? Fair question—at least, one I certainly had.
Turns out, you may want to go on one of the company’s trains early in the day so that you can hike—the area around Chateaux d’Oex is a popular hiking spot—or, if you plan to do the cheese train tour on a days with open stores and shops, you might choose to go up in the morning to do a little shopping at the handful of boutiques in town. (Note: Although we took the cheese train on a Friday, most of the stores were closed.)
Whatever train you take, you’ll want to you arrive before 11:45 a.m. The restaurant with the cheese-making demonstration—located not far from the destination train station—has the demonstration and lunch at 12 p.m. sharp. If you don’t arrive beforehand and find the restaurant before that time, you’ll miss the demonstration part of the deal (though they’ll still feed you, at least if you arrive within a normal noon to 2 p.m. lunch timeframe).
As I didn’t understand all this in advance, we didn’t have the right gear or clothes for hiking and I hadn’t mapped out any routes in the area for hiking, either. This meant that, although we arrived at around 11 a.m., we wandered around the town a bit before making our way over to the restaurant listed for the demonstration and lunch.
Cheese Demonstration and Fondue Lunch
When we arrived, a woman in the gift shop on the entrance floor sent us downstairs to the restaurant, where someone showed us to a table, took our tickets, and handed us menus.
We did not realize that the man in the room stirring a large pot over a fire was the cheese demonstration. After all, he wasn’t talking, no one else was talking to tell us what was happening, and we didn’t receive anything other than a piece of paper handed to us with our menus explaining how cheese is made. Frankly, I thought he was part of the chalet-like touristy restaurant décor.
However, after he’d wrapped up, two people arrived and asked about the cheese-making demonstration part of their cheese-train experience. The wait staff told them that the demonstration had happened at noon and that it would not happen again. They’d missed it.
Frankly, we’d mostly missed it, too, not knowing that we were meant to pay full attention to what the man was up to over there, across the room, and to compare it to the piece of paper explaining cheese making that we’d received with our menus.
The lunch is straightforward: A perfectly decent cheese fondue of the Swiss gruyere-emmental half-and-half mixture (also known as moitié-moitié). Do note that if you want anything in addition to bread and melted cheese, whether salad or charcuterie or something to drink, you must order it from the restaurant’s menu and pay the additional cost.
No big deal, but the high price of the very basic additions you could likely want to add to your meal may surprise you. (It did us.)
Would I Recommend the Cheese Train?
At the end of your meal, the restaurant will give you a gift (the adults in our group received a shot glass and a blanket and the adolescent received a mug) and you can then choose any departing train to return to Montreux. Unlike the train up to Chateaux d’Oex, the return train is a regular, modern-day, nonpanoramic train—though the view will still impress you. This is a particularly gorgeous part of an already gorgeous country, after all.
Would I recommend a ride on the Swiss cheese train?
We’d have had a better experience if we’d received more information and guidance on what to expect. I’d recommend The Chocolate Train as a first choice, but as it only runs on certain days and at certain times, I’d call The Cheese Train a decent second option (especially with this guidance on what it entails!).