Tourist attraction
Pilatus Railway
Steepest cogwheel railway on Earth, its track bolted directly into a sheer mountain cliff face.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Pilatus Railway above Lucerne follows the Zurich engineer Eduard Locher and the six hundred laborers, mostly Italian, who spent three summers in the eighteen eighties bolting track directly into bare rock rather than laying it on a bed. It traces why an earlier, gentler design was rejected, and the sideways idea Locher had about how a cogwheel could grip a slope steep enough to throw a train off it. You will hear how he financed the risk himself after the government refused. Best heard looking straight up the cliff face from the valley station.
This audio guide was created using AI.