Tourist attraction
Pilatus-Bahnen AG
Steepest cogwheel railway on earth, climbing a forty-eight percent grade up bare mountain rock.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Pilatus cogwheel railway above Lucerne follows the six hundred laborers, most of them Italian migrants, who spent three summers cutting a ledge into bare limestone in the eighteen eighties. It centers on Zurich engineer Eduard Locher, whose unconventional fix let the line beat a gradient no ordinary rack railway could survive. You will hear what Swiss federal engineers feared about wind on this exposed summit. Look down at the rail beneath your car for a trace of the original nineteenth-century work.
This audio guide was created using AI.