72625 posts
Hi rhinnant and welcome to MySwissAlps!
Yes, you would need to buy a vignette for driving on Swiss highways. You can get more details on how to do this here: Swiss Motorway Vignette
For your train trips, you may want to look at the various Swiss rail passes, depending on where and how often you travel by train when you are here.
Lucas
1206 posts
Hi,
If you are renting a car in Switzerland, it should already have a valid vignette mounted on the windshield.
If you are driving into Switzerland from another country, you must purchase a vignette if you plan to use any of the motorways. They are only 40 CHF, and this is the same price for only a few days or for an entire year (actually 14 months). If you want to get around easily and quickly, they are well worth it, because the autoroutes allow you to pretty well miss the messy traffic you can encounter in cities and towns. If you look at the attached map, you will see that there is a whole lot of mountains between Interlaken and the Rhone Valley in the Valais, and so you will have to take a round-about route. The map is a bit out of date (for instance the motorway between Bienne and Delémont is now open) but this is the one that is currently on the following website: http://www.autobahnen.ch/