The mountain pass bus
A yellow bus on the hairpins of a pass road above Airolo, below the Gotthard.
Every summer, yellow buses cross the great passes in the middle of Switzerland’s Alps: the Susten, the Grimsel, the Furka, the Nufenen and the Gotthard. Day tours string them together, and you can cross three, or four, before evening.
Three passes, or four, in a day
For three passes, you set out from Airolo, Andermatt or Meiringen and go over either Nufenen, Furka and Gotthard or Susten, Furka and Grimsel, before heading back to where you started. The grand tour of four passes leaves from Meiringen and takes first the Grimsel, then the Nufenen and the Gotthard, and last the Susten: over 10,000 metres of climbing, and four changes of canton. On some passes the bus stops at the top for the view.
One pass alone: the Gotthard
The Gotthard can also be crossed on its own, from Airolo to Andermatt. Buses first went up it in 1922. Since 1842, the post’s coaches had linked the north and south of the country over the pass, but the railway, opened in 1882, had taken most of their travellers: the bus did not come to replace the train, people took it for the pleasure of the pass, often in an open-top bus, for which you had better wrap up warm. At the top, the hospice, the national museum devoted to the pass and Sasso San Gottardo, a former artillery fortress long kept secret, are worth a stop.
Why the map’s bus keeps quiet
The map’s bus is just a yellow bus, with no horn and no lettering, and it never sounds its horn: it climbs its hairpins in silence.
On the map
The map keeps only a piece of it: a stylised pass road above Airolo, climbing towards the Gotthard. Five big hairpin bends lie on the slope like a ribbon; the road stops below the pass, where the map writes its name, and does not go down to the village. It is dark asphalt, with a dashed line and grey parapets at the turns. The yellow bus does no tour of the passes here: it climbs, waits at the top, comes down, waits at the bottom, and sets off again. The vehicles on the map are there for play: they keep to no timetable and don’t show where the real ones are. To travel, check the official timetables; and if you’d like the map to do more, write to us, our links are at the top of the page.
Sources: the operator’s pages on the mountain pass routes of the Central Alps and on the history of the Gotthard line, consulted on 15.10.2026.