Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway

For more than half a century the trains of the Furka line climbed over the Alps instead of under them, and today steam engines do so again. The Furka mountain section runs about 18 km from Realp in the canton of Uri, over the watershed and down to Gletsch and Oberwald in the upper Rhône valley in Valais. Its highest station, Furka, sits at 2,160 metres, making it one of the highest rail crossings in Europe, and the route alternates between ordinary adhesion track and Abt rack sections as steep as about 11 per cent, with a 1,874-metre summit tunnel beneath the pass.

Construction began in 1911, stalled during the First World War, and the line finally opened in 1925 as part of the Furka Oberalp railway. It was always a struggle. Avalanches made the route impossible in winter, so every autumn the overhead wires were taken down, the tunnel portals shut with gates, and the Steffenbach bridge was folded away out of reach of the avalanches, only to be reassembled after a winter lasting nearly seven months. When the Furka Base Tunnel opened in 1982 the mountain section was abandoned, and by law it should have been dismantled.

Railway enthusiasts stopped that from happening. An association formed in 1983 and an operating company in 1985, and volunteers from Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands began rebuilding the line section by section: passenger trains returned to Tiefenbach in 1992, reached Gletsch in 2000 and Oberwald on 12 August 2010. Almost all the work, from track maintenance to driving the engines, is still done unpaid. Several of the locomotives have remarkable stories of their own: rack engines built in Winterthur in 1912–13 for the original Furka railway were sold to Vietnam after electrification and rescued from sheds on the Tháp Chàm–Đà Lạt line in 1990, then restored and brought home to climb the Furka once more.

The pleasure of the ride lies in slowness and noise: the bark of a rack locomotive working hard on the grade, the views over the Reuss valley on the Uri side, the stone viaducts such as the one at Steinstafel, and the descent into the Rhône valley past Gletsch.

Getting there

Both ends of the line, Realp and Oberwald, are stations on the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn between Andermatt and Brig, so the steam railway is easily combined with an ordinary train trip. The nearest larger towns by straight-line distance are Domodossola in Italy (about 50 km) and, within Switzerland, Kriens near Lucerne (about 53 km); the nearest airport is Lugano (LUG), about 75 km away.