Pilatus railway

Interesting facts

The track uses a narrow 800 mm gauge, and its trains travel at only about 9 to 15 km/h on the steep climb.

Under steam, the ascent took about 30 minutes and the descent 40; modern railcars do the climb in roughly 20 minutes.

The line opened with eleven steam railcars, each combining a boiler and passenger compartment in a single vehicle.

In its first years the railway carried about 35,000 passengers annually and passed its one millionth passenger in 1901.

The route runs through eight short tunnels, four in the Wolfort section and four below the Eselwand cliff.

The line is electrified at 1,650 volts DC, a conversion carried out in 1937 that ended almost fifty years of steam working.

The railcars introduced in 2022–2023 seat 46 passengers and use regenerative braking, saving roughly 30 percent of energy.

Trains pass one another at the mid-point Ämsigen, where rotating track sections replace the usual points.

A first proposal for a railway up Pilatus was made in 1873, more than a decade before construction began.

Why it is worth it

The Pilatus Railway is the steepest rack railway in the world. From Alpnachstad on the shore of Lake Alpnach it climbs 1,629 metres in 4.6 km to a terminus just below the Esel summit of Pilatus, at 2,073 metres, with an average gradient of 35 percent and a maximum of 48 — close to one in two. The ride is short but relentless, and the lake drops away below the whole way up.

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. It was electrified in 1937, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers named it a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 2001.

The line has no ordinary points: cars are shifted between tracks on turntables and traversers, and the rails sit directly on the rock, anchored without ballast. Some of the original rack rails are still in use, having simply been turned over when their teeth wore down. New energy-efficient railcars built by Stadler entered service in 2023. The railway runs seasonally, roughly from May to October; a cable car approaching from the other side of the mountain runs year-round apart from a short maintenance break.

Getting there

The valley station at Alpnachstad is across the street from Alpnachstad station on the Zentralbahn's Brünig line, served every half hour by Lucerne S-Bahn trains (S5), and next to a pier for Lake Lucerne boats from Lucerne. The nearest major airport is Zürich (ZRH), about 60 km away, from where trains run to Lucerne.

From the encyclopaedia

The Pilatus Railway is a mountain railway in Switzerland and the steepest rack railway in the world, with a maximum gradient of 48% and an average gradient of 35%. The line runs from Alpnachstad, on Lake Alpnach, to a terminus near the Esel summit of Pilatus at an elevation of 2,073 m (6,801 ft), which makes it the highest railway in the canton of Obwalden and the second highest in Central Switzerland after the Furka line. At Alpnachstad, the Pilatus Railway connects with steamers on Lake Lucerne and with trains on the Brünigbahn line of Zentralbahn.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Pilatus railway

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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From the encyclopaedia