Jungfrau Railway — rack railway
Salamanamanjaro ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0

Jungfrau Railway

Jungfraubahn

  • 2 min read
  • 46.585° N 7.961° E

Interesting facts

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • An earlier 1869 scheme proposed a pneumatic railway and sledge rides behind reindeer or polar dogs across the Aletsch Glacier.
  • The first 2 km open-air section to Eigergletscher was built entirely by hand, without machines.
  • A bonus promised to the shift that broke through led workers to use more dynamite than allowed; the final blast came at 5:35 a.m.
  • The railway cost about 16 million Swiss francs to build, double Guyer-Zeller's estimate of 8 million.
  • Guyer-Zeller first forecast 20,000 and later 43,500 passengers a year; in 1912 some 77,000 people rode the line.
  • Until 2009 the railway kept a kennel of Greenland sled dogs at Eigergletscher, first used to haul food and mail up from Wengen in winter.
  • Descending trains feed braking current back into the line, and three trains going down produce enough power for one going up.
  • Year-round operation only became possible in 1937, when the railway bought its first snowblower.

Why it is worth it

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.

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.

The journey has its own set pieces. At Eismeer, trains stop long enough for passengers to look out through windows cut into the east face of the Eiger, over a chaos of crevassed ice. Near the old Eigerwand station a person-sized tunnel opening called the Stollenloch leads directly out onto the Eiger's north face. The line is also a technical curiosity: it is one of very few railways in the world still powered by three-phase current, which is why its trains carry two pantographs. At the top, the Jungfraujoch holds a research station and the Sphinx Observatory, and the high Alpine landscape around it belongs to a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The railway starts at Kleine Scheidegg, reached from Interlaken by the Bernese Oberland Railway to Lauterbrunnen or Grindelwald and then the Wengernalp Railway uphill. Since December 2020 the Eiger Express cable car also runs from Grindelwald Terminal to Eigergletscher station, where passengers join the rack line. The nearest large town is Thun, about 32 km away; Bern Airport (BRN) is about 51 km away and Zurich Airport (ZRH) about 107 km, both with good rail connections to Interlaken.

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Bern 13The Most Beautiful Places in Switzerland 44The Most Spectacular Rack Railways in Switzerland 6The Most Spectacular Rack Railways 12The Greatest Engineering Wonders in Switzerland 21The Greatest 19th-Century Engineering Wonders 22The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

The Jungfrau Railway is a mountain rack railway in the Bernese Alps, Switzerland, connecting Kleine Scheidegg in the Bernese Oberland to the Jungfraujoch, across the Valais border. It is the highest railway in Switzerland and Europe, running 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) from the station of Kleine Scheidegg to the Jungfraujoch, well above the perennial snow line. As a consequence, the railway runs essentially within the Jungfrau Tunnel, built into the neighbouring Eiger and Mönch, to protect the line from snow and extreme weather.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

46.58538, 7.96122per Wikidata