Albula Railway — heritage railway
Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 2.5

Albula Railway

Albulabahn

  • 2 min read
  • 46.409° N 10.020° E

Interesting facts

  • In October 2022 the line hosted a world record: a passenger train of 100 cars, about 1.9 km long, formed from 25 Capricorn units.
  • Before the railway opened, the journey from Chur to the spa of St. Moritz took about 14 hours by stagecoach.
  • The Albula Tunnel runs beneath the watershed between the Rhine and the Danube, a few kilometres west of the Albula Pass.
  • Water bursting into the Albula Tunnel during construction drove the building contractor into bankruptcy; 1,316 people worked on it and 16 were killed.
  • The two headings of the Albula Tunnel met deep inside the mountain in the early hours of 29 May 1902.
  • At 89 metres, the Solis Viaduct over the Albula gorge is the highest bridge on the entire Rhaetian Railway network.
  • To shield the line from avalanches at Piz Muot, builders raised about 11 km of dry-stone walls, then the largest avalanche barrier in Switzerland.
  • St. Moritz station was laid out as a through station because the line was meant to continue over the Maloja Pass to Chiavenna in Italy.
  • Coal shortages during the First World War pushed the railway to electrify the line, with the first section energised in April 1919.
  • In winter, special trains carry tobogganers from Bergün up to Preda, from where they sled back down the snow-covered Albula Pass road.

Why it is worth it

The Albula line is where Swiss railway engineering turned into landscape art. Linking Thusis with St. Moritz across the canton of Graubünden, the 61.7 km metre-gauge railway was begun in September 1898, opened in July 1903 and extended to St. Moritz a year later. To carry trains from the valley of the Albula to the Engadine without rack assistance, its builders designed 55 bridges and 39 tunnels, keeping the gradient to a maximum of 3.5 percent. In 2008 it was inscribed together with the Bernina line as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Rhaetian Railway in the Albula/Bernina landscapes.

Its signature is the Landwasser Viaduct near Filisur. Built between 1901 and 1902 of dark limestone without conventional scaffolding, it curves on five tall piers 65 m above the river and runs straight into a tunnel bored through a sheer cliff, so that a train appears to pour out of the rock face onto the arches. Designed by Alexander Acatos, it is only 136 m long, but few railway bridges have become such an image of an entire country.

The other marvel is less visible from the train and more astonishing on a map. Between Bergün and Preda the line must gain about 417 m in only 6.5 km, and the engineer Friedrich Hennings solved this with three spiral tunnels and two curved tunnels, stacked on the hillside so that the track loops back over itself and passes the same slopes several times at different heights. Beyond Preda the line enters the Albula Tunnel, 5,866 m long and at 1,820 m among the highest Alpine rail tunnels in Switzerland, and emerges in the Engadine. A walking trail follows the line from Preda down to Bergün, where a railway museum near the station tells the story of its construction.

Getting there

The line runs between Thusis and St. Moritz; Chur, the capital of Graubünden, is about 60 km from the line and has direct Rhaetian Railway trains over the Albula to St. Moritz. The nearest airport in a straight line is Il Caravaggio at Bergamo (BGY), about 86 km away across the mountains, and within Switzerland the small St. Gallen-Altenrhein Airport (ACH) is about 125 km away; for most travellers Zurich Airport (ZRH), connected to Chur by the Swiss rail network, is the practical choice. The Glacier Express and the Bernina Express both use the line. For the best view of the Bergün spirals, sit on the left heading south from Chur.

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Grisons 6The Most Beautiful Places in Switzerland 44The Most Beautiful Heritage Railways 12The Greatest Engineering Wonders in Switzerland 21The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

The Albula railway line is a single-track metre gauge railway line forming part of the core network of the Rhaetian Railway (RhB), in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland. It links Thusis on the Hinterrhein at 697 m (2,287 ft) and Filisur at 1,080 m (3,540 ft) with the spa resort of St. Moritz in Engadine at 1,774 m (5,820 ft).

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