The Most Spectacular Rack Railways in Europe
9 places in 4 countries · updated 5 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular rack railways in Europe are Gornergrat Railway (Switzerland), Jungfrau Railway (Switzerland) and Pilatus railway (Switzerland). The list covers 9 rack railways in 4 countries. Switzerland has the most, with 6. Last updated 5 October 2026.
The rack railway is largely a Swiss invention, born of the late nineteenth-century rush to bring visitors up into the Alps. Ordinary trains cannot climb gradients much steeper than a few per cent, so engineers such as Niklaus Riggenbach and Roman Abt laid a toothed rail between the tracks for a cogwheel to grip. With it, trains could reach summits and glaciers that had been the preserve of climbers, and lines built for tourists in the 1870s to 1910s still run along the original routes.
The Vitznau–Rigi railway, opened in 1871, was the first mountain rack railway in Europe. The Pilatus railway above Lake Lucerne is the steepest in the world, using horizontal cogwheels to climb gradients of up to 48 per cent. The Gornergrat Railway climbs from Zermatt to a ridge facing the Matterhorn, and the Jungfrau Railway tunnels through the Eiger and Mönch to Jungfraujoch, the highest railway station in Europe. Below it, the Wengernalp Railway is the longest continuous rack line in the world, linking Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald by way of Kleine Scheidegg.
Beyond Switzerland the form travels well. The Brienz Rothorn Railway is still worked largely by steam locomotives. In France, the Montenvers Railway runs from Chamonix to the edge of the Mer de Glace, and in Wales the Snowdon Mountain Railway climbs to the summit of Yr Wyddfa as the only public rack railway in Britain. In Greece, the narrow-gauge Diakofto–Kalavryta Railway winds through the deep Vouraikos gorge, switching between ordinary track and rack sections.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gornergrat Railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 2 | Jungfrau Railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 3 | Pilatus railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 4 | Wengernalp Railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 5 | Vitznau–Rigi railway | Rack railway | Switzerland | |
| 6 | Montenvers Railway (Chamonix) | Rack railway | France | |
| 7 | Snowdon Mountain Railway | Rack railway | United Kingdom | |
| 8 | Diakofto–Kalavryta Railway | Rack railway | Greece | |
| 9 | 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 line is a little over 9 km long, built to metre gauge with the Abt rack system and gradients of up to 20 percent. It crosses the Findelbach on a viaduct, threads short tunnels and a long avalanche gallery above Riffelboden, and stops at Findelbach, Riffelalp, Riffelberg and Rotenboden on the way up. Rotenboden is the stop for the small Riffelsee lake just below the line. At first the trains ran only in summer; winter service reached the summit in the early 1940s, once the avalanche gallery had been completed.
Did you know? Its three-phase system uses two overhead wires, with the running rails acting as the third conductor; only four lines in the world work this way.
02 Jungfrau Railway
Jungfraubahn
Switzerland46.585° N 7.961° E
Salamanamanjaro ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The idea belonged to the industrialist Adolf Guyer-Zeller, who received a concession in 1894 for a line that was meant to reach the summit of the Jungfrau itself, with a lift for the final ascent. Work began in 1896 and dragged on for sixteen years, through an explosion that killed six workers, a four-month strike and the founder's death in 1899. Sections opened one at a time — Eigergletscher in 1898, Eigerwand in 1903, Eismeer in 1905 — until the tunnelers broke through the ice at the Jungfraujoch on 21 February 1912. The summit plan was dropped, and the saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau became the terminus.
Did you know? Adolf Guyer-Zeller conceived the line after a hike near Mürren, when he saw a train climbing to Kleine Scheidegg, and sketched the route that night.
03 Pilatus railway
Pilatusbahn
Switzerland · 6.8 km from Sarnen46.956° N 8.277° E
SchmalspurDVZO · CC BY-SA 4.0 Such a gradient was impossible for conventional rack systems of the 1880s, because a cogwheel engaging the rack from above could climb out of the teeth and lose its grip. The engineer Eduard Locher solved it by laying a horizontal double rack between the rails, with teeth on both sides, gripped by two cogwheels turning on vertical shafts beneath the car. The arrangement could not jump out of engagement and also held the car against the strong crosswinds on the mountain. Work began in March 1886; about six hundred labourers, mostly Italians, built the line in three summer seasons, and it opened on 4 June 1889, financed entirely with private money.
Did you know? Under steam, the ascent took about 30 minutes and the descent 40; modern railcars do the climb in roughly 20 minutes.
04 Wengernalp Railway
Wengernalpbahn
Switzerland46.576° N 7.944° E
Kabelleger · CC BY-SA 4.0 The ride is a sequence of set pieces. From Lauterbrunnen, a valley walled by cliffs and waterfalls, the train hauls itself up the western slope to Wengen, a resort village on a sunny terrace with no cars; for its residents the railway is the only way in. Above Wengen the line comes out on the open alpine pastures of Wengernalp, where the Jungfrau massif stands across the gorge startlingly close. The summit station at Kleine Scheidegg, at 2,061 metres, faces the Eiger north wall head-on, and from there the line drops past Alpiglen and Brandegg towards the green bowl of Grindelwald.
Did you know? For the same reason the motor car always sits at the downhill end of the train, a safety rule kept since electrification in 1909.
05 Vitznau–Rigi railway
Bahnstrecke Vitznau–Rigi Kulm
Switzerland · 10.1 km from Stans47.010° N 8.483° E
Image by Sarah_Loetscher from Pixabay The Rigi was the natural place to start. By the 19th century it was already famous as the "Queen of the Mountains", a massif rising between the lakes of Lucerne, Zug and Lauerz, with a summit hotel at Rigi Kulm since 1816. Goethe had climbed it in 1775, Turner painted it in the blue light of dawn, and Mark Twain described the ritual of the Rigi sunrise in A Tramp Abroad. The railway turned what had been an expedition on foot or horseback into an excursion, and grand hotels multiplied across the mountain.
Did you know? With its summit station at 1,752 metres, the Rigi line ranks as the highest standard-gauge railway in Europe, and the highest railway in both the cantons of Lucerne and Schwyz.
06 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 line is 5.1 km of metre-gauge track using the Strub rack system, with gradients between 11 and 22 per cent. Steam worked it for its first half-century; it was electrified in 1954. Trains climb at 14 to 20 km/h and cover the ascent from Chamonix, at about 1,035 m, to Montenvers station at 1,913 m in around twenty minutes, winding through larch and spruce forest and across a viaduct before emerging onto a balcony high above the ice. The line has had a darker chapter too: in August 1927 a train derailed on the Montenvers viaduct, killing fifteen people.
Did you know? When it was electrified, the railway adopted 11,000-volt single-phase alternating current at 50 Hz, an unusual choice for a mountain line at the time.
07 Snowdon Mountain Railway
United Kingdom53.100° N 4.104° W
Image by Whitechappel79 from Pixabay The railway opened on 6 April 1896, and its first day ended in disaster: a train derailed on the descent and a passenger, Ellis Griffith Roberts, died after jumping from a carriage. The inquiry blamed ground that had settled in the freeze and thaw of winter. The line is now fitted with gripper rails as a safety measure, and diesel locomotives from the Hunslet works in Leeds joined the Swiss steam engines between 1986 and 1992.
Did you know? His change of heart came after a rival line renamed its station Snowdon in 1893 and began drawing tourists away from Llanberis.
08 Diakofto–Kalavryta Railway
Οδοντωτός σιδηρόδρομος Διακοπτού - Καλαβρύτων
Greece38.094° N 22.165° E
Stathis floros · CC BY-SA 4.0 The line was part of the ambitious plan of the prime minister Charilaos Trikoupis to connect Greece by rail. It was built by a French company with Italian craftsmen who had learned their trade on Alpine railways, and it opened on 10 March 1896 as a branch of the Piraeus, Athens and Peloponnese Railways — for its time one of the most difficult pieces of engineering in the country. Steam locomotives built by Cail in 1891 worked it for decades; one is displayed on a plinth at Diakopto and another is preserved at Kalavryta. Diesel-electric units from Billard took over in the late 1950s, and between 2007 and 2009 the rack and track were renewed and new Swiss-built Stadler trains introduced.
Did you know? It is the steepest railway in Greece, rising from sea level to about 720 metres in roughly 22 km.
09 Brienz Rothorn Railway
Brienz-Rothorn-Bahn
Switzerland · 20 km from Sarnen46.787° N 8.037° E
Johnw · Public domain The journey takes about 55 minutes, and it is the slowness that makes it. The train leaves Brienz at 566 metres, by the lake, and works its way up through forest and meadow, pausing at the passing loops of Geldried, Planalp and Oberstafel, where trains going up and down meet. The engines work hard on the grade, trailing smoke and steam into the alpine air. Higher up the trees thin out into open pasture and rock, and the turquoise surface of the lake drops further and further below.
Did you know? Up to 640 workers, most of them Italian labourers, built the line in about sixteen months between 1890 and 1891.
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 are the most spectacular rack railways in Europe?
- On our list, Gornergrat Railway (Switzerland) ranks first, followed by Jungfrau Railway (Switzerland) and Pilatus railway (Switzerland).
- Which country has the most rack railways in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Switzerland (6), France (1) and Greece (1).
- What is the steepest rack railway in the world?
- The Pilatus railway in central Switzerland, opened in 1889, with gradients of up to 48 per cent. It uses the Locher system, in which two horizontal cogwheels grip a rack with teeth on both sides so they cannot ride up and out of it.
- What is the highest railway station in Europe?
- Jungfraujoch, at 3,454 metres, the upper terminus of the Jungfrau Railway. The last part of the line runs inside a tunnel through the Eiger and the Mönch, and the line opened to the top in 1912.
- How does a rack railway work?
- A toothed rail, the rack, is laid between the running rails, and one or more cogwheels under the train mesh with it. This lets the train climb and descend gradients far too steep for wheel-on-rail friction alone.
- How many rack railways are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 9 rack railways in 4 countries. Switzerland has the most, with 6.