Landwasser Viaduct
Landwasserviadukt
Interesting facts
- Around 22,000 trains a year cross the viaduct, roughly 60 every day.
- The piers were raised without scaffolding partly to save money and partly because the Landwasser river was prone to dangerous floods.
- Inside each tall pier stood an iron tower, later walled in, from which a crane platform was hoisted upward as the masonry rose.
- Stone came from a limestone quarry about 500 metres downstream, linked to the site by a temporary narrow-gauge field railway.
- The whole structure cost 280,000 Swiss francs, and the first trains rolled across it in October 1902, about 19 months after work began.
- The 2009 renovation took eight months and some 24,000 working hours, while trains kept crossing at a crawl of 10 km/h.
- Because of its World Heritage status, the new concrete track trough was faced with granite so that the bridge would look unchanged.
- The track climbs at a gradient of 2 percent as it crosses the bridge, on its way up towards the Albula Pass.
- In the film Anastasia it appears transformed into a taller, aqueduct-like bridge in Poland that is destroyed by Rasputin's minions.
- Because it straddles two municipalities, Bergün Filisur and Schmitten, it is listed twice as a cultural property of national importance.
Why it is worth it
The Landwasser Viaduct is the image most people have of Alpine railways: six slender stone arches curving high above a wooded gorge and running straight into a tunnel mouth in a sheer cliff. It carries the Albula line of the Rhaetian Railway over the Landwasser river between Schmitten and Filisur in Graubünden, 65 m above the stream and about 140 m long. The curve is tight, with a radius of only 100 m, the smallest used anywhere on the line, so from the train you can look forward and watch the front of your own train enter the rock.
The viaduct was designed by Alexander Acatos and built by the firm Müller & Zeerleder in 1901 and 1902. The builders did without conventional scaffolding for the tall piers; the limestone pillars were raised around steel-reinforced cores with the help of cranes, while the flat arches between them each span 20 m. About 9,200 cubic metres of dark local limestone went into the masonry, and the 216 m Landwasser Tunnel beyond was aligned with the bridge so that the track leaves the arches and enters the cliff face without a pause. For more than a century the structure needed no major work; its first renovation came in 2009, carried out while trains kept running.
Since 2008 the viaduct has been part of the Rhaetian Railway in the Albula and Bernina landscapes World Heritage Site, and it remains the signature structure of the line. It has become a film location too, appearing briefly in the animated film "Anastasia" (1997) and in "A Cure for Wellness". The best way to understand its elegance is to see it twice: once from a train, including the panoramic cars of the Glacier Express, and once from below, when a train crosses the thin arches with the forest falling away beneath them.
Getting there
The viaduct is near the village of Filisur on the Albula line; Chur is about 22 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is St. Gallen-Altenrhein (ACH), about 90 km away; Zurich Airport (ZRH) is the main international gateway, with rail links towards Chur and the Albula line. From Filisur station a broad path along the railway reaches the first viewing platform in about 20 minutes, and the Rastplatz Landwasserviadukt at the foot of the bridge in about 45 minutes. The stop Schmitten GR Landwasserviadukt lies about five minutes' walk from one of the viewing platforms.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Landwasser Viaduct is a single-track six-arched curved limestone railway viaduct. It spans the Landwasser between Schmitten and Filisur, in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland.
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