Lugano to Como by train?
 

We would like to drop our car off in Lugano (after touring Switzerland) and take the train to Como to pick up another car. This is to save the horrible drop off fee charged taking the car from one country to another. We would drop off our car at the Lugano train station and pick up a car at the Como train station. Any problems with this??? Any suggestions appreciated.

Train ride from Lugano to Como's San Giovanni station is 40 minutes. Trains run Appx every 30 minutes.

Como is city of 80,000+ thousand so you might want to look at the location of the station and the rental car office.

Two train stations in como - be sure you drop your car off at the one Big Red mentions

the other station probably don't even have a car drop-off but i'm not sure - the Nord de Milan (sp?) station right by the boat docks and about a mile or so from the mainline S Giovanni station where you arrive from Lugano.

Drop the car off at Locarno, Switzerland and you can take a boat on Lake Como to Como i believe for a novel way there

I do not believe that either city has a drop at the train stations--it may depend on your vendor, but I doubt if it will work that easy.

I'm sure Bobthenavigator is correct about offices at the train stations, but I do know that the AutoEurope office in Como is not very far from the San Giovanni station. Perhaps farther than you want to walk with luggage but not an outrageous taxi fare away. I checked the location of their office in Lugano, and there are three: airport, via Monte Boglia and via Clemente Maraini. The last one is closest to the train station.

But where are you going after you pick up the car in Italy? If you're staying on Lake Como for a few days, you probably won't want a car during that time, and you could take the bus from Lugano to Menaggio thus saving some rental expense and avoiding Como until you need to pick up the next car.

www.autoeurope.com

Thanks for all the help! We are spending the night in Lugano and then heading south, stopping in Parma for a night and then on to our villa in Tuscany! This will be our fourth Tuscan holiday in the past 8 years, so we thought we would check out the Parma/Bologna area. Maybe Como isn't the best place to pick up a car, but we need someplace in Italy. We thought about Milan but we want to avoid the big city. Any help is appreciated.

Como is fine--you just may neeed to taxi to the car office--plot the address on Google maps.

How do you boat from Lucarno to Como. Aren't they on different lakes?

EVen though this is an old thread that just got topped (2009!) - for the record, there are 3 train stations in Como. Como S. Giovanni, Como Nord Lago and Como Nord Borghi.

>>>How do you boat from Lucarno to Como. Aren't they on different lakes?<<<

Are you asking about Locarno or Lugano? Different lakes all.