Roll into any railway station in the Swiss Alps in winter and you’ll encounter passengers carrying skis, snowboards and backpacks and clomping around in ski boots. Locals use the efficient Swiss rail network to access the slopes as a matter of course, and storage space is provided for ski and boards in the carriages. In many places, such as at La Châble station below Verbier, you can get off the train and hop on to a ski lift. A few minutes later you can be schussing down the piste.

Discovering how and when you can get to the Alps’ ski resorts by train is easy now thanks to a map published last month, The Alps – Skiing by Train (£7.95 including p&p), which charts 200 resorts in seven countries across the range from France to Slovenia. The aim is to help skiers and snowboarders plan a low-carbon journey to the mountains.

Last winter, I took a trip that the new map would have been ideal for – a week-long ski safari between three very different Swiss ski areas. I left my home in France bound for the resort of Scuol, at the eastern end of Switzerland, via the resorts of Disentis and Arosa-Lenzerheide.

Piste and quiet … train routes take skiers to villages away from the big resorts

I set off from Bourg-Saint-Maurice on a crisp January morning and arrived in Geneva four hours later to change on to the Swiss rail network and travel to my first stop, Disentis. Initially, this was on the high-speed, double-decker Inter-City (IC) service, from which there are magnificent views of the scenery. Then, as we hit the mountains, I hopped aboard the bright red, metre-gauge Rhaetian Rail (RhB) service at Chur, which operates in the kind of wild terrain through which trains really have no right to be chugging.

Disentis is in the Graubünden region at an altitude of more than 1,100 metres – a geographical inconvenience that appears to be of no concern to the Rhaetian Rail service, which deposited me at Disentis station in the early evening. A taxi ride from here took me to my accommodation on the outskirts of town at the Nangijala Guest House (nangijala.ch), a short walk away from the cable car that would take me up into the mountains the next morning.

Arosa station. Photograph: Andy Mettler

I woke to brilliant mid-winter sunshine and met up with ski guide Adi Schürmann, who assured me we were in for a good day on the slopes. He wasn’t wrong. Disentis’ relative isolation allowed us a day of quiet off-piste skiing down high-alpine slopes that gradually descended into shady forest before popping out 1,500-metres beneath our starting point, back at the cable car station in town.

My journey continued the next day, with a 10-minute walk to Disentis station, where towing my wheelie ski bag behind me didn’t garner a second glance from locals. The train to Arosa was, of course, bang on time. I had to change in Chur again (a “361ft walk between platforms”, according to the Swiss Federal Railways website; the change en route to Disentis had been a mere 121ft) and then spent the journey with my nose pressed up against the carriage’s picture window. I stared at mountains, frozen waterfalls, towering crags and snow-bound forests, pretty alpine villages and high and narrow bridges spanning deep chasms. The book I’d taken along sat unopened on my lap.

Scuol’s church on its rocky outcrop

I’m not sure how many hundreds of feet I had to walk to the Vetter Hotel (doubles from £70 B&B) when I eventually arrived in Arosa but it was within sight of the station and even closer to the ski lift.

I had a couple of days in Arosa, which was a favourite destination of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the days when skiing was all about tweeds, plus-fours and pipes. The resort was recently linked to neighbouring Lenzerheide via a cable car that travels over a yawning void from the 2,511-metre peak of Hörnli to 2,546-metre Urdenfürggli.

The two resorts have more than 200km of pistes between them. A great way to make the most of the terrain is to ski Arosa’s sunny south-facing slopes in the morning then pop over to Lenzerheide around lunchtime when the slopes there are also catching the rays.

Photograph: Robert Matton AB/Alamy

The final stop on my ski-and-rail safari was the lesser-known resort of Scuol in the Engadin region, on the borders of Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Getting here involved a meandering four-hour trip through glorious mountain scenery and the Vereina tunnel, which at just over 19km is the world’s longest metre-gauge tunnel.

Popping out on the far side of the tunnel felt like arriving in a different country, where settlements display Italianate rather than alpine architecture and Romansh is the first language of many residents. My ski guide was Peder Rausch, who has lived all of his 60-plus years here.

Arosa, once a favourite resort for Arthur Conan Doyle

There were relatively few skiers other than myself and Peder, despite it being a Saturday. Scuol’s appeal lies in it being a low-key resort with enough good skiing to cater for all ability levels. It is not afflicted by mass tourism and retains much of the region’s traditional mountain culture and architecture. A wander around the town revealed an attractive old settlement of squat, sturdy stone buildings featuring funnel-shaped windows and ornate wall paintings called sgraffito, all set beneath the slender spire of a church standing atop a rocky outcrop.

It was a two-minute bus ride from my hotel back to Scuol station, from where I made my way back to France via Geneva. As with the rest of my trip, every leg of the journey was on schedule – with never more than a few minutes’ wait between connections; ski storage was easy and, best of all, I enjoyed views almost as spectacular as those I’d seen while skiing.

• The trip was provided by MySwitzerland. An eight-day Swiss Rail travel pass costs £326 for unlimited travel on trains, buses and boats (four days £219). Trains from London St Pancras to Geneva take around seven hours, including a change of station in Paris

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