Schilthorn Cableway — aerial tramway
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay

Schilthorn Cableway

Luftseilbahn Stechelberg – Schilthorn

  • 2 min read
  • 46.562° N 7.858° E

Interesting facts

  • A location scout for the Bond producers found the Schilthorn in March 1968 after spotting a postcard of its unfinished summit station in a Grindelwald hotel.
  • By 1967 the money had run out and the summit station stood only as a bare shell; the film producers paid to finish it in exchange for shooting there.
  • In Ian Fleming's novel, Piz Gloria is a peak over 3,000 metres high reachable only by cable car, which is exactly what the Schilthorn offered.
  • For the film the cabins were painted orange and given Blofeld's coat of arms; the colour, meant to be temporary, stayed until the cabins were replaced in 1995.
  • The helicopter pad built by the Bond production at the summit survives today as a viewing platform.
  • At Gimmelwald the original line saves money with a trick: the haul rope is simply deflected around a wheel, yet passengers still have to change cabins.
  • The section from Mürren to Birg is the longest of the system and climbs 1,039 metres in a single span.
  • The new Stechelberg–Mürren line reaches a maximum angle of about 58 degrees, with an average gradient of nearly 92 per cent along its whole length.
  • In 1970, just three years after opening, the line counted more than a million section journeys; by 2017 the yearly figure had passed three million.
  • Since 1928 the Inferno race has sent skiers from just below the summit nearly 15 km and almost 2,000 metres down to Lauterbrunnen.

Why it is worth it

The cable car from Stechelberg to the Schilthorn is a staircase of ropes climbing out of the steep-walled Lauterbrunnen valley to a summit at 2,970 metres in the Bernese Oberland. Built in stages from 1963, the line opened as far as Mürren and Birg in 1965 and reached the top in 1967, hopping from the valley floor to the cliff-top villages of Gimmelwald and Mürren, on to Birg and finally across a long, airy span to the summit, the longest and most technically demanding section of the original system. It is listed as a Swiss cultural property of national significance.

The summit owes its fame to cinema as much as to the view. Before the top station was finished, the producers of the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service chose the Schilthorn as a key location, shot there between October 1968 and May 1969, and paid to complete the summit building for their use. It opened to the public as Piz Gloria, a revolving restaurant that turns through a full circle in about 45 minutes, so that diners watch the panorama move past their tables. That panorama is the real reason to come: some two hundred Alpine peaks, among them the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau. At Birg, the intermediate station, a cliff-side walkway called the Thrill Walk and a viewing platform, the Skyline, hang out over the drop.

The line has recently been rebuilt almost from the ground up. In December 2024 a new direct cable car opened between Stechelberg and Mürren, climbing 775 metres up the sheer face of the Mürrenfluh in about four minutes. With a maximum gradient of 159.4 per cent it is counted as the steepest cable car in the world, and its cabins each carry up to 85 people. At the same time a new section of the Funifor type, the first in Switzerland, began running between Mürren and Birg, and the whole trip from valley to summit now takes around 22 minutes. The old two-stage line through Gimmelwald remains in service for the village.

Getting there

The valley station is at Stechelberg, at the head of the Lauterbrunnen valley. The nearest town of any size is Thun, about 28 km away in a straight line, and the usual approach is by road up the valley from Lauterbrunnen. The nearest airport is Bern (BRN), about 48 km away. Mürren can also be reached from Lauterbrunnen by cable car to Grütschalp and then by the mountain railway to Mürren, joining the Schilthorn line there.

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Bern 13The Most Beautiful Places in Switzerland 44The Most Spectacular Cable Cars 13The Greatest Engineering Wonders in Switzerland 21The Greatest Modern Engineering Wonders 26The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

46.56186, 7.85759per Wikidata