Lausanne's antique funicular, which linked the seaside part of town, Ouchy, to the train station and upper part of town has been dismantled and will soon be replaced by automatic driverless rubber-tired metro cars as the line has been incorporated into the town's nascent metro lines. The last of the rack-railway funicular cars left Ouchy on Mar 2, 2006 but they are not destined for the scrap heap of history as they are headed for Villard de Lans in France for use there.
The new Ouchy metro line should be in service by early 2007.

I'm so sorry to hear that. I first visited Lausanne in 1970. My friends and I stayed in a huge corner room at Pensione des Fleurettes and went up and down the funicular several times. That was the year I fell in love with Switzerland. Lausanne's is still one of my favorite train stations. I suppose next you'll tell me that the See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil sculpture is no longer down near the harbor either. J.

So how do you get from the train station down to the quai for the time being? Just curious. Thanks for the interesting post PalQ.

suppose a bus but don't know

There was always a bus line roughly parallel to the funicular... now this line is carrying most of the passengers. Last time I was in Lausanne they borrowed some extra long trolley buses from Geneve (with two joints). Obviously there are quite a lot of people on their way...

How long is the walk between the station and Ouchy?

10 minutes (or a bit more?).

The Swiss love their little funiculars and such conveyances.

Berne has a similar contraption, linking the Bundesterrasse (the promenade outside the Federal Parliament building) with the Marzili neighborhood below. It runs on water - no kidding: There are two carriages that cross in the middle, each has a huge tank underneath the chassis.

The upper carriage's tank gets filled up, hence it weighs more, and it pulls the lower carriage up while descending from its own weight. Water gets emptied below while the now upper carriage gets filled, etc.

When the old Marzilibähnli had to be torn down many years back, just like in Lausanne now, the government requested design ideas for a replacement from the citizens, and all manner of variations on a technical theme were submitted.

In the general population, the young and the fit consider this conveyance to be for wimps - it's a matter of pride not to use it but to walk up the steep hill without complaining.

In keeping with that sentiment, one wag proposed a low-maintenance solution that would cost no fuel: To make it one long carriage from top to bottom, with a broad set of steps inside...

The other story: When a tourist laughed about the short ride in the silly-looking little contraption and said that surely this had to be the smallest train anywhere in the world, a local replied, tongue firmly planted in cheek, that this may well be so, but that - while pointing at the Federal Parliament building above - it surely had the world's biggest administration building.

WK

Just checked the Lausanne Public Transportation site. From 26 of January 2006, M2 "Metro" has been replaced by a bus line called "Metro Bus". PalQ, you guessed correct. I also saw on another site that the new M2 line will open sometime in 2008. Hard to say which is correct 2007 or 2008.

The railway in Lausanne wasn't actually a funicular. A funicular is a railway with carriages attached to a cable and pulled by a stationary engine, from the Latin word "funis", meaning "cord". The line at Lausanne was a rack railway: the cars have their own motive power and ascend gradients with a cog wheel which engages a toothed rail.

http://mikeaz.free.fr/suisse/LausanneOuchy01.htm

According to above, the original line opened in 1888 was a funicular (with cable) and in 1958, it was changed to the late cog wheel (rack rail) system. Confusion occurred there I guess.