Travel to Interlaken for the Open Science Retreat

I had been invited to attend the Open Science Retreat (OSR), in Batenberg, Interlaken, Switzerland and this is my journey. I have posted another post about the event itself. When I was looking at travel options, I wanted to at least explore the option of going by train rather than flying. When travelling in Europe I always like to explore the options. Going by train is usually more interesting that flying, sometimes more fun and of course always better for the environment.

The OSR started at 4pm on Sun 13th April, and finished 4pm on Thursday 17th April 2025.

Looking at the logistics, going by train from Weymouth (UK) to Interlaken (Switzerland) would mean I had to stay overnight somewhere. There aren’t (yet) any sleeper services that work for this journey unfortunately. The options seemed to be to stay overnight in Paris, or Basel.

I did look at flying. The nearest airport to Interlaken (with a reasonable number of connections) was Zurich, and from there to Interlaken is a approx 2.5 hour train journey. I would also have to travel to London adding another 4 hours (3 hours Weymouth to London Waterloo, 1 hour from London Waterloo to whichever airport I would fly from), plus of course getting to the airport 2-3 hours before the flight.

The flight times, with the last flight leaving Zurich at 5:10pm, also meant that I wouldn’t be able to leave Interlaken until the following day, as we finished at 4pm - I would an extra night in a hotel, which I would need on the train anyway.

The cost was also comparable - flying was a bit cheaper - but there wasn’t much in it. My rough notes were that flying would be ~£150 and the train might be ~£50 - ~£90 more.

Seat61.com is a really useful website for train travel anywhere in the world, and I found it really useful as a planning tool. It also has handy advice on booking tickets which was invaluable.

In the end my journey was:

• Sat 12th April

  • 0803 Weymouth 1120 Waterloo £39.70
  • 1431 London St Pancas 1758 Paris Garde du Nord £94
    • Stay overnight Paris

• Sun 13th April

  • 07:58 Paris Gare de L’Est 14:21 Interlaken West £144.02

• Sun 13th - Thu 17th April Open Science Retreat

• Thurs 17th April

  • 16:34 Interlaken West 22:15 Paris Gare de L’Est £86.65
  • Stay overnight Paris

• Fri 18th April

  • 0902 Paris 1030 London £179
    • 1235 Waterloo 1515 Weymouth £27.70

A total of £571.07 - unfortunately significantly more than my initial estimate, but I was a bit late in booking this, about a month before hand, so make sure you book early!

Once booked, the journey itself went very well. I had the joys of a (planned) rail replacement bus from Southampton to Eastleigh but this all went (more or less) to plan. For the journey, I would also recommend the SBB - Swiss Federal Railways app (below). It was very useful for real time departures and also lists which platform the train is on - very handy when you have a tight connection!

Different attendees at OSR had different priorities and a number did fly from the UK and other places in Europe. It is a difficult balance to consider the time / price / environmental issues of travel choices that this type of event requires. I am happy with the choices I made, but of course they are not for everyone. We did also have participants from Brazil and Nigeria, but I think it would be very tricky for them to get to Switzerland without flying!

I’ve written about train travel before and I think my experience was similar this time - well worth the little extra money to save quite a significant amount of CO2. The extra time is (for me) now slightly harder to justify - but in this case I don’t think it would have made much difference anyway, with the overnight stay.