Ride the world's steepest cable-car to this remote Swiss village

Only in Switzerland can you speed down a slope racing against a train. Skiing Jungfrau’s piste 36 brings me alongside the distinctive red carriages of a Jungfrau Railway train, its locomotive whirring as I sweep down the piste, carving turns to steady my velocity just as the cogs on the train control its speed on the steep descent. And at the bottom, in Wengen, there’s time to get myself a coffee and strudel before taking the train back up, observing other people’s technique — or lack of it.

If you’re itching for action, that ride back up, however congenial, can feel a bit slow. But from this winter, the long-awaited completion of the vertigo-inducing Schilthornbahn 20XX cable-car offers a fast-track to explore Jungfrau ski region’s 250km of interconnected pistes. Rising sharply against cliffs — with an incline of 160% making it the steepest aerial cableway in the world — it will pass through the village of Mürren (inaccessible by road) to deposit skiers up at the revolving Piz Gloria restaurant. As well as making the uphills nearly as thrilling as the downhills, it will speed up journey times, whisking skiers from Stechelberg, on the valley floor, up to 2,970m in just 22 minutes.

Engineering achievements abound in Jungfrau, but somehow the region has retained its quaint, wooden chalet Alpine charm. And nowhere more so than Grindelwald, a village sitting pretty beneath Schwarzhorn’s 2,928m peak. Descending on the steep blues and reds at the top of Grindelwarld’s Oberjoch peak, I drop below the treeline to crisscross runs full of tobogganers shuttling around under the Wetterhorn’s imposing flanks, skiing through villages fragrant with the heady smells of farmyards and wood smoke.

But even sleepy Grindelwald is being plugged into the new era. The 2020 opening of the Eiger Express gondola cut a whopping 47 minutes off the original 90-minute journey time to the Eiger glacier at Wengen’s Kleine Scheidegg ski hub. And now you can also shuttle from Grindelwald to Wengen on a second gondola, reaching the Männlichen peak in the heart of the Jungfrau ski area in less than 20 minutes.

Wengen’s central position makes it a popular base with British skiers, and you can’t glide under the Eiger’s notorious north face without marvelling at the ingenuity of the engineers who built a train tunnel inside the mountain in 1912, a quarter of a century before the first climbers managed to scale its sheer peak.

But in early winter, Wengen can feel permanently in the shadow of the Eiger, so for a dose of vitamin D, I head for Mürren. The resort, with its high base station and snow-sure winters, has slopes that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s watched the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which was shot here. And until the Schilthornbahn 20XX cable-car opens this winter, getting to Mürren will continue to be a Bond-worthy mission.

I take the cable-car up from the station at Lauterbrunnen to board another train that runs along the top of the cliffs, until I reach isolated, car-free Mürren. Dubbed ‘the railway that nobody wanted’ when it was built in 1891, this charming two-coach, narrow-gauge train was once considered an unwelcome intrusion of modernity and technology.

There’s no doubt, however, it was wanted by some, not least British skiers. These trains can arguably be considered the very first ‘ski lifts’. It was in Mürren that the Swiss opened the high mountain railways for the 1909-10 season and built new ones for skiers, after persuasion by English travel agent Sir Henry Lunn. So, the first mechanised uphill transport for skiers was born. Previously, trains only ran in summer, and I can still spot the avalanche barriers that were needed to help build this vertiginous feat.

One person who wouldn’t have wanted the intrusion of any new transport is Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Bond villain whose hideout was set above Mürren in the film. By the time I arrive at his fictional lair, now the Piz Gloria rotating restaurant, I feel I’ve earned one of its excellent dirty martinis. From this winter, I’ll be able to get there from Stechelberg on the valley floor, via Mürren in three swift cable cars.

Every secret agent needs an escape planned. And, having explored the Bond Museum’s behind-the-scenes clips, costumes and props, I make a swift exit down a black run. Recreating 007’s escape on skis is exhilarating enough, but my course also follows the 15km-long route of the Inferno. The world’s longest, oldest and perhaps craziest downhill amateur ski race is an infamously scrappy event, with nearly 2,000 people attempting it every January. By the time I reach Lauterbrunnen station, I’m just about staying upright. But I don’t let that stop me from observing other people’s technique, or lack of it, on the train ride back up.