Published on: 26 January 2015  | Last updated: 5 November 2018

If you’re thinking about travelling in or through Switzerland, the Swiss Federal Railways website (sbb.ch de/fr/it/en) has lots of useful inform­ation: it’s probably the most helpful rail company website I’ve come across. The bike home page is: sbb.ch/en/bicycle

Screenshot from the bike section of the Swiss Railways website sbb.ch/en/bicycle

There are also a couple of useful downloads (links are to the English versions, they are available in other languages): Bicycle and train  is a pretty compre­hensive guide with a map of ‘self-loading locations’.

The sbb.ch: online timetable uses the same software as the bahn.com Deutshe Bahn website. However there are some differ­ences to bear in mind:

• the SBB don’t show the bike logo against services that have bike-carriage facil­ities: the service is assumed to have bike-carriage facil­ities unless the website shows a bike logo that has been crossed out;
• if the search results show a bike pictogram in a box it means that reser­va­tions are compulsory
• sometimes you see both picto­grams  - this means that the service takes bikes, but you need a reser­vation, and you can’t load it yourself (no I don’t know how that works exactly).

Legend from the sbb.ch: online timetable showing bike picto­grams and their significance

Buying tickets

I’m planning to travel through Switzerland on my way to Italy this year. I booked my ticket and bike place with the voyages-sncf.com call centre in the UK and rang the Swiss Travel Centre - only to find that the booking window for Swiss Railways tickets is two months. To make things even more confusing, so far as I can tell you can only book tickets online one month ahead. the good news is that you can buy bike tickets online. (I’ll update this when I’ve booked my tickets.