Untersbergbahn GmbH

This guide to the Untersbergbahn ropeway in Salzburg starts with a budget: engineers planned for twenty-four and a half million schillings and traces how the bill kept climbing as they discovered no machine could survey these limestone cliffs, only climbers on ropes. You'll hear about the steel tower planted on a cliff face too steep for a crane, the crews sleeping in tents through the winter of 1959, and the makeshift railways hauling material up, including one nicknamed the Geisterbahn, the ghost train, for never stopping. It follows what investigators later blamed for pushing the final cost so far past plan.