When I was putting this trip together, with the exception of the Bologna to Munich leg, I admit to not paying that much attention to which trains would take me the most scenic routes. All I cared about was whether a given train would deliver me from point A to point B at close to the correct time. I also was never quite able to figure out how to ensure I was facing forward on the German trains, but that is another story.
Upon boarding the train in Heidelberg (and wishing not for the first or last time that I had just taken the damn rolling suitcase) I found myself sitting backward and very quickly unable to look at the computer screen or read much on the kindle without risking a very awkward situation with the woman across from me. Thus, I was forced to look out the window as we hugged the bank of the Rhine from Heidelberg to Bonn. Around each bend there was another castle ontop of the hill, some pristine, some in ruins, each with a town below it with more hills beyond. Not quite the same scale at the Alps, but half the castles and towns I saw could have come right out of a Brother's Grimm, minus the cars.
After about an hour of this unexpectedly scenic train journey I "remembered" that people had been building castles, houses and hovels along this river for thousands of years and the weight and depth of the history that I was traveling through hit me. So I attemped, again, to read my kindle.
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