Blonay - Chamby Train Museum, VD
This is wonderful experience for all locomotive lovers! This wonderful train museum is dog-friendly too, and your fur kids can board the train that takes you up to the museum for free!
The Blonay-Chamby Train museum was a surprise find and was a crowd pleaser for our family. It’s 10 minutes from Montreux, where we had spent the weekend, so a perfect spot to pass by on the way back home to Geneva.
To get there, you can drive and park in the public car park right next to the station or take the SBB train. By car, it’s a short drive from Montreux. making it a perfect stop if you find yourself there with a half day to spare.
There is a traditional looking ticket office where you can buy your tickets on the train platform. Tickets are CHF22 per adult, free for children under 6 and CHF11 for children between 6 and 11 years old.
You can get CHF2 discount tickets from the tourist booklets often found at the Tourist office or other Touristic attractions in Vaud and surrounding cantons, so if you can get hold of this booklet, you can get a ticket to this museum for a little cheaper.
Even though they didn't have to pay to board, the kids and the dog each got a ticket which I thought was pretty neat and added to the whole experience! As you can see, Luka was super thrilled to find himself with a ticket to board a train that had no windows and the back of which was completely open!
The time table is pretty limited, so it’s a good idea to know when the trains leave, so you don’t find yourself hanging around for a long time, especially since there is nothing to do in Blonay itself. This museum is only operational during the weekend i.e. Saturdays and Sundays.
We took the morning train which departed at 11:20 am, which went to the Chamby train station which is in fact a disused train station that the train briefly stops at, before then coming back on itself before arriving at the train museum itself. The journey to the final destination takes about 15 minutes.
Once you arrive at the train museum, you will find a warehouse with a whole host of different types of trains, most of which you can go inside of. It was a nice experience, because these trains do in fact look like what they look like in period movies! The children had a great time exploring different trains, and most of them had a sign which explained how old they were and a little history behind them.
There is a little cafe there, which has a terrace as well as an indoor dining space offering basic salads, meats and French fries and the likes. The terrace was the perfect place for us to park ourselves, whilst the dog got to lay down and chill after the somewhat unnerving train ride and the kids got to play on a model train while we waited for our food to arrive.
The timetable is well managed, because it gives you enough time to explore the trains, have a meal then by the time you are wondering what else you want to do, a steam train turns up to take you home to Blonay train station. Just as well, because this museum is only accessible by the trains operated by the museum.
Since we didn’t take the steam train up to the museum, it was nice to go on a steam train back.
All in all, it was a nice way to spend 3 or so hours with the children and the dog and I highly recommend it!
The children loved it too, my daughter still goes to sleep with her train ticket every night, which unfortunately is getting quite worn down but she still loves it!
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