The Most Spectacular Rack Railways in the World
12 places in 6 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular rack railways in the world are Gornergrat Railway (Switzerland), Mount Washington Cog Railway (United States) and Jungfrau Railway (Switzerland). The list covers 12 rack railways in 6 countries. Switzerland has the most, with 6. Last updated 6 October 2026.
A rack railway climbs where ordinary trains would slip. A toothed rail laid between the running rails meshes with a cogwheel under the locomotive, and the train can haul itself up gradients far beyond the reach of friction alone. The result is a train pointed at a summit: carriages built on a slant, tracks clinging to ridges, and a slow, steady ascent from meadow to rock and ice.
The Mount Washington Cog Railway in New Hampshire, opened in 1869, was the first mountain-climbing rack railway in the world, and the Vitznau–Rigi line followed in 1871 as the first in Europe. Switzerland dominates the rest: the Pilatus railway, steepest of all with gradients of up to 48 per cent; the Gornergrat line above Zermatt facing the Matterhorn; and the Jungfrau Railway, which tunnels through the Eiger and the Mönch to the highest station in Europe. Beyond the Alps, the Nilgiri Mountain Railway climbs into the hills of southern India, Greece's Diakofto–Kalavryta line follows a narrow gorge, and Snowdon's railway reaches the summit of Wales.
The railways were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map; the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gornergrat Railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 2 | Mount Washington Cog Railway | Rack railway | United States | |
| 3 | Jungfrau Railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 4 | Pilatus railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 5 | Wengernalp Railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 6 | Nilgiri Mountain Railway | Rack railway | India | ✓ |
| 7 | Vitznau–Rigi railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 8 | Montenvers Railway (Chamonix) | Rack railway | France | |
| 9 | Snowdon Mountain Railway | Rack railway | United Kingdom | |
| 10 | Diakofto–Kalavryta Railway | Rack railway | Greece | |
| 11 | Pikes Peak Cog Railway | Rack railway | United States | |
| 12 | Brienz Rothorn Railway | Rack railway | Switzerland |
01 Gornergrat Railway
Gornergratbahn
Switzerland · 38.8 km from Sion46.024° N 7.750° E
Kabelleger / David Gubler ( http://www.bahnbilder.ch ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Gornergrat Railway climbs from the resort village of Zermatt, at about 1,604 metres, to a station at 3,089 metres on the Gornergrat ridge, facing one of the grandest mountain panoramas in the Alps. Opened on 20 August 1898, it was the first electric rack railway in Switzerland and the highest railway in Europe until the Jungfrau line opened in 1912; it remains the highest open-air line on the continent. Its trains are still powered by three-phase current, which is why each carries two pantographs under a pair of overhead wires, a system used on only a handful of lines in the world.
Did you know? Work on the line began in 1896, only five years after the Visp–Zermatt railway first connected Zermatt to the Rhône valley.
02 Mount Washington Cog Railway
United States44.274° N 71.332° W
Image by Dustytoes from Pixabay The Mount Washington Cog Railway was the world's first mountain-climbing rack railway, and it still hauls passengers up the highest peak in the northeastern United States. Its founder, Sylvester Marsh, conceived the idea while climbing the mountain in 1852; paying passengers first rode in August 1868, and the track reached the 6,288 ft summit on 3 July 1869. The line is about three miles long and rises some 3,600 ft from its base station, and carries passengers from forest to the treeless summit.
Did you know? The line is nicknamed the Railway to the Moon, after a legislator joked that Sylvester Marsh might as well be granted a charter to the moon.
03 Jungfrau Railway
Jungfraubahn
Switzerland46.585° N 7.961° E
Salamanamanjaro ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Jungfrau Railway climbs from Kleine Scheidegg, at 2,061 m, to the Jungfraujoch, at 3,454 m — the highest railway station in Europe. Its 9 km of metre-gauge rack track are mostly hidden: about four-fifths of the line runs inside a tunnel bored through the Eiger and the Mönch, where the snow and storms of the high Alps cannot reach it. Only the first stretch, up to Eigergletscher station, is in the open, and even that is the second-highest open-air railway line in Switzerland.
Did you know? To prove the altitude was safe, in 1894 seven test subjects aged 10 to 70 were carried by porters to a 3,750-metre plateau on the Breithorn.
04 Pilatus railway
Pilatusbahn
Switzerland · 6.8 km from Sarnen46.956° N 8.277° E
SchmalspurDVZO · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Pilatus Railway is the steepest rack railway in the world. From Alpnachstad on the shore of Lake Alpnach it climbs 1,629 metres in 4.6 km to a terminus just below the Esel summit of Pilatus, at 2,073 metres, with an average gradient of 35 percent and a maximum of 48 — close to one in two. The ride is short but relentless, and the lake drops away below the whole way up.
Did you know? The track uses a narrow 800 mm gauge, and its trains travel at only about 9 to 15 km/h on the steep climb.
05 Wengernalp Railway
Wengernalpbahn
Switzerland46.576° N 7.944° E
Kabelleger · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Wengernalp Railway climbs from the valley of Lauterbrunnen over the pass of Kleine Scheidegg and down again to Grindelwald, right under the north faces of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau. Opened in 1893, it runs for about 19 km and is the longest continuous rack railway in the world. The track is 800 mm gauge, with a rack between the rails that lets trains grip gradients as steep as 25 per cent. The line was built for steam and electrified in 1909 and 1910.
Did you know? The carriages have a fixed uphill and downhill end, with seats tilted to match the slope, so a train cannot simply run over the pass to the other valley.
06 Nilgiri Mountain Railway
India11.344° N 76.792° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
No machine-readable author provided. AHEMSLTD~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5 The Nilgiri Mountain Railway climbs from the plains of Tamil Nadu into the Blue Mountains on a metre-gauge line 46 km long, and on its steepest stretch it needs a toothed rack to do it. Between Kallar and Coonoor the track uses the Abt rack-and-pinion system to tackle gradients as steep as 1 in 12 — the steepest railway in Asia. On the way it negotiates some 209 curves, 16 tunnels and around 250 bridges, and the train takes close to five hours to climb and three and a half to come down.
Did you know? Plans for a railway up to the Nilgiri Hills were drawn up as early as 1854, yet some 45 years passed before trains finally reached Coonoor.
07 Vitznau–Rigi railway
Bahnstrecke Vitznau–Rigi Kulm
Switzerland · 10.1 km from Stans47.010° N 8.483° E
Image by Sarah_Loetscher from Pixabay On 21 May 1871 a small steam train pushed its way up from the shore of Lake Lucerne towards the Rigi, and Europe had its first mountain railway. The engineers behind it — Niklaus Riggenbach, Ferdinand Adolf Naeff and Olivier Zschokke — used a rack system that Riggenbach had developed: a toothed rail between the running rails, into which a cogwheel on the locomotive meshes, allowing trains to climb gradients far beyond the reach of ordinary railways. The line from Vitznau reached the summit station of Rigi Kulm in June 1873, and its success helped launch the age of the rack railway in the Alps.
Did you know? It was only the second mountain rack railway in the world, preceded solely by the Mount Washington Cog Railway in the United States.
08 Montenvers Railway (Chamonix)
Chemin de fer du Montenvers
France · 39.9 km from Aosta45.923° N 6.875° E
Tiia Monto · CC BY-SA 3.0 The little red rack train from Chamonix exists for a single view: the Mer de Glace, the "sea of ice" that pours down from the heart of the Mont Blanc massif. At roughly 7.5 km, and far longer when its feeding glaciers are counted, it is the largest glacier in France, and in the eighteenth century it was already the destination of travellers who rode mules up the slope to Montenvers to stare at a surface one visitor compared to storm waves frozen in an instant. The railway replaced the mules: the first section, to Caillet, opened in 1908 and the full line in 1909.
Did you know? On 14 August 1975 the line carried more than 11,000 passengers in a single day, running 81 round trips.
09 Snowdon Mountain Railway
United Kingdom53.100° N 4.104° W
Image by Whitechappel79 from Pixabay The Snowdon Mountain Railway climbs to the summit of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), the highest mountain in Wales, and it is the only public rack-and-pinion railway in the United Kingdom. The line runs for about 4.7 miles from the village of Llanberis, rising some 3,140 ft from 353 ft to 3,493 ft above sea level on an average gradient of about 1 in 7.9 and a steepest section of about 1 in 5.5. Its narrow 800 mm gauge and Abt rack — a pair of toothed rails between the running rails — came from Swiss practice, as did the first locomotives, built by the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works of Winterthur in 1895–96.
Did you know? The local landowner, Assheton-Smith, blocked the railway for two decades, fearing it would spoil the scenery, before finally relenting in the 1890s.
10 Diakofto–Kalavryta Railway
Οδοντωτός σιδηρόδρομος Διακοπτού - Καλαβρύτων
Greece38.094° N 22.165° E
Stathis floros · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Odontotos, the "toothed railway", is one of the great small railways of Europe. It climbs 22 km from Diakopto, on the shore of the Gulf of Corinth, to the mountain town of Kalavryta at about 720 m, and almost all of that distance is spent inside the Vouraikos gorge — a deep, narrow cleft where the track runs on ledges, crosses the river again and again on small bridges and threads short tunnels through the rock. The gauge is only 750 mm, and on the steepest sections, where gradients reach 17.5%, a toothed rack between the rails engages a cog on the train. There are three such rack sections, totalling 3.8 km, using the Abt system.
Did you know? The line and its steam engine, nicknamed Madame Hortense, star in Gerald Durrell's 1974 children's fantasy The Talking Parcel.
11 Pikes Peak Cog Railway
The Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway
United States · 12.1 km from Colorado Springs38.856° N 104.931° W
Milan Suvajac · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few railways anywhere climb as hard as this one. From a depot in Manitou Springs at roughly 1,930 metres, the line runs about 14 kilometres up the flank of Pikes Peak to a summit terminus at 4,302 metres (14,115 feet). The average gradient is around 12 percent and the steepest pitches reach 25 percent, far beyond what ordinary wheels on rails can grip, so the trains haul themselves up on a toothed rack laid between the running rails. The operator calls it the highest cog railway in the world, and it is one of only three cog railways still running in the United States.
Did you know? A single climb by one of the original steam locomotives burned slightly under a ton of coal.
12 Brienz Rothorn Railway
Brienz-Rothorn-Bahn
Switzerland · 20 km from Sarnen46.787° N 8.037° E
Johnw · Public domain Most Swiss mountain railways went electric long ago; the Brienz Rothorn Railway never did. Opened on 17 June 1892 after two years of construction, the line climbs 7.6 km from the shore of Lake Brienz to a summit station at 2,244 metres, and most of its trains are still pushed up the mountain by steam locomotives. Between 1953 and 1990 it was the only steam-operated line in Switzerland, and it remains the highest railway in Europe without overhead wires. The track is narrow, just 800 mm between the rails, and gradients reach 25 per cent — one in four — so a toothed rack of the Abt double-lamella type runs down the middle, gripped by a cog wheel under the engine.
Did you know? The railway was planned by the German engineer Alexander Lindner, and its concession, granted in December 1889, ran for 80 years.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the steepest rack railway in the world?
- The Pilatus railway near Lucerne, opened in 1889, has a maximum gradient of 48 per cent and is the steepest rack railway in the world. It uses a special horizontal rack system designed by Eduard Locher.
- Which country has the most rack railways?
- In our collection, the most come from Switzerland (6), the United States (2) and France (1).
- What was the first mountain rack railway?
- The Mount Washington Cog Railway in New Hampshire, opened in 1869, was the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway. In Europe, the first was the Vitznau–Rigi railway in 1871.
- What is the most spectacular rack railway in the world?
- On our list, Gornergrat Railway (Switzerland) ranks first, followed by Mount Washington Cog Railway (United States) and Jungfrau Railway (Switzerland).
- How many rack railways are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 12 rack railways in 6 countries. Switzerland has the most, with 6.