As it happened, there was. It involved taking a train across the roof of Switzerland, along with a bit of tobogganing, boutique-hopping and snowball fights along the way. It was called the Glacier Express.

In the whole genesis of world railways somebody forgot to tell the Swiss that trains don’t go up mountains. The country is riddled with ditsy little bahnen, many of them 100 years old, which look arthritic in the valley bottoms, but which go trundling up vertiginous rock faces with ease.

The Glacier Express, which runs between Zermatt and St Moritz, is the most celebrated of these mountain railways. It doesn’t really look like a real train at all, just an impossibly big toy, painted bright red. But in the course of its eight-hour journey it toddles up the Rhine gorge, over the Oberalp Pass, through the Fürka massif and into the Valais. In so doing it passes through 91 tunnels, crosses 291 bridges and plumbs seven valleys, plunging to 600 metres at its lowest point and reaching 2,033 metres at its highest point, twice the height of Ben Nevis.

This is all very well for adults, who appreciate the combination of nature at its most spectacular and man at his most ingenious, but what about the kids? At the ages of 11 and 9, would our two derive entertainment from sitting on a 75-year-old train, albeit one with a fantastic view?

We started at St Moritz, supposedly the grand dame of sophisticated resorts, although we found it dull. It was near the end of the ski season, and the smart set had gone, leaving a few fur-clad ladies carrying around their jacketed pooches.

We arrived to the sound of alpenhorns, and from the window of our room in the Hotel Schweizerhof we could see a man in a wheelchair being serenaded on the helicopter pad, his ski holiday at a premature end after colliding with a rock.

At breakfast we watched a nanny in proper Julie Andrews uniform mopping up extraneous jam from one of her charges. “Would you like that, to have your own member of staff?” we asked our two. “Nah, it would be boring,” grunted Thomas, 11.

The Express leaves St Moritz just after breakfast, and sets out to impress straight away. As it descends into the Rhine gorge it plunges repeatedly into the mountainside, completing slow disembowelling circles in the darkness before emerging into daylight again, 100m lower down. From the panoramic coach — 180 degrees of glass — we could spot where we were ten minutes ago, and where we were likely to be in ten minutes’ time.

Despite themselves, the children had to admire the sheer scale of the chasm we were negotiating. “It looks like Mordor,” said Thomas: quite an endorsement from a diehardLord of the Rings fan.

Halfway down we left the snowline behind to enter an altogether lighter, brighter world of blossom, spring flowers and huts stacked with wood. “Viel Holz vor der Hütten” murmured my wife, who is German. “Lots of wood in front of the hut. You know what that means? Big bosoms.”

By the time lunch was served, in an Orient Express-style walnut-walled restaurant carriage, we had bottomed out in apple-blossom land and were climbing back up into snow country again, tackling beef stroganoff on the hairpin bends. The head waiter, an Italian version of Alf Garnett, kept us entertained as he rode the aisle. “Ah,” he said, when the train ground up through a snowbound farmstead and the restaurant car filled with an unmistakable stench, “cow poo, the Nina Ricci of the Alps.” And then, just before the top of the Oberalp, he gestured out of the window at a dribble of water cutting through dazzling sheets of white: the Rhine. You could have dammed it with a 50p piece.

We broke the journey at Andermatt, which was little more than a sleepy village on a plateau in the hills, dripping gently in glorious spring sunshine. There we rented a toboggan and pioneered a few furrows in remarkably deep snow. The same shop hired us a snowboard, and we all had a go at teaching ourselves.

Next day we were back on the Glacier Express. This time it was snowing hard but not settling, a reminder of how hard it must be to maintain a year-round service on such a vulnerable stretch of line. The taped commentary announced that we were passing through the Valais village where the hotelier César Ritz was born, adding that wherever he went he carried a big piece of his homeland with him. “Probably cow poo,” murmured Thomas.

At Zermatt, terminus for the Glacier Express, we spilled out of our little red train into a resort which, unlike St Moritz, was buzzing with life and refreshingly free of cars. At its heart is an old Valais village, with stone barns that still accommodate token sheep and cows, surrounded by boutique-lined lanes, which were all at the sale stage of their season.

The shoppers were keen to get cracking, but we hadn’t finished with mountain railways yet. The Gornergrat-Monte Rosa railway, the first electric rack railway in Switzerland, started service from Zermatt more than 100 years ago. It climbs 1,400 metres into the lee of the Matterhorn, and it is still the main access to the pistes for Zermatt’s skiers.

We didn’t climb aboard the train to ski, however. We had come to test one of the most serious toboggan runs in the Alps, run by the Gornergrat railway company. The system is simple: rent your sledge at Rotenboden station, then follow the run down to Riffelberg, dust yourself down and rejoin the train to go back up.

The system may be simple, but the toboggan run is not. It gets progressively steeper. By the time the four of us were reunited at the end of our first attempt, we were dishevelled and shaken. No one was raring to go up and do it again.

The next time, though, was better, and gradually we learned to master the toboggans and take a line on the corners. By early afternoon we could all come hurtling down the run without mishap, ululating around the corners and braking as little as possible.

Back in Zermatt that evening we were probably more bruised than everyone else doing the rounds of the boutiques: but how many of them had been using a sledge to catch a train?

NEED TO KNOW

Getting there: Andrew Eames and family travelled with the Switzerland Travel Centre (00 800 1002 0030, www.MySwitzerland.com), which offers two-night packages from £1,413 for two adults and two children under 13. The price includes B&B in a family room at the Hotel Perren in Zermatt and Hotel Schweizerhof in St Moritz and three-day rail passes which cover the Glacier Express with meals on the train. Flights to Geneva are not included but can be arranged.

Reading: Great Railway Journeys of Europe (Insight Guides, £16.99); Switzerland: Rail, Road, Lake (Bradt, £12.95).

Further information: Glacier Express (www.glacierexpress.ch).

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