Ask a child to draw a train and they will draw the Bernina Pass train for you.

Everything is there to remind us of our tender childhood and the archetype of electric miniature trains: the railway track, the red locomotive, the tunnels, the bridges, the snow-capped mountain peaks reflected in a lake... the Swiss train that makes us dream in all its splendor!

We had already crossed the Bernina Pass once when we went to Italy in 2019. In Tirano, after having to let the red train pass in front of us on the road like a common tram and not at a conventional level crossing, I swore to myself that I would come back because I found it so strange that a train could take a street normally reserved for cars in any other place.

Beyond that, among the Alpine passes I know, the Bernina Pass is, in my opinion, the most beautiful. We had stopped at the parking lot of the pass inn with Wilson I (today's Wilson is Wilson II). From there, a footpath descends to a small lake and a small railway station.

This year, when planning my trip to Tunisia, I thought my first stop would be the Bernina Pass, but I overestimated the distances and stopped early. This wasn't a bad thing because it made me realize the very essence of the site's inscription: the need to open up a region that is difficult to access by train, with all the technical complications that this entails. If you're driving from Switzerland, before reaching St. Moritz at the foot of the pass, you first have to cross another pass, the Julier Pass. And it's the same on the southern slope in Italy: coming from the Camonica Valley, you have to cross the Passo dell'Aprica. And the road over these three passes is narrow.

Luckily, as I had arrived early in the morning on the slopes of the Bernina Pass with the mobile home, I joined the train and we climbed parallel to it at the same speed. It was like child's play to get ahead of it to take pictures on the fly as it passed. And then it disappeared but arrived in Tirano, I crossed paths with the one who was leaving in the other direction. Both on the Swiss and Italian sides, the landscape is breathtaking and the train that winds silently under the glaciers in the middle of the pastures is bucolic as can be.

Unlike Nan, I have only dreamed of one thing since then: to board the train this time, taking the time to admire the technical prowess of civil engineering. I would add nothing but enthusiasm about the inscription of this site on the UNESCO list, even though other men in other places have built such dizzying railways (India, Austria, Iran...); if it had not been, I would probably never have thought of going there...