Snowdon Summit #2
Once upon a time, there was a grand summit building atop the summit of Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa.) It was built in the 1930s by the noted Welsh architect, Clough Williams-Ellis, whose Portmeirion village is famous the world over. By the 1990s had become something of a disreputable place and the…
Snowdon summit
Wales’ highest railway station is at the summit of Snowdon (3560 feet/1085 metres) where for many years there was essentially a proper station with ticket office and waiting rooms, plus semaphore signals and point rodding, levers, etc, all the ‘mod cons’ needed to make the site every inch a true…
Tyne & Wear Metro on the Rigi!
As the news blurb said, it was an unknown train that had heated up the rumor mill. ‘For some time now, a strange train has been standing on track 13 at Arth-Goldau station.’ What was this strange train doing in this part of Switzerland? It was a brand new Tyne…
Auto train for a rack railway
The Appenzeller Bahn (AB) in Switzerland has ordered a rack-and-pinion rail vehicle for its 1.96km long Bergbahn Rheineck–Walzenhausen. The line has one intermediate station at Ruderbach. What is most unusual for this rack railway is its new vehicle is to be fully automated and have no driver – thus the…
Swiss rack lines’ new trains
The Pilatus, Rigi and Gornergrat rack railways recently got some very smart looking and futuristic new stock. The designs are a radical departure from the classic look that has been a feature of the Swiss rack lines for years. Even when the Wengernalp and Jungfrau Bahn acquired new stock a…
Pilatus Bahn 130 #3
How did the mountain get its name? How did Pilatus get its name? There are various claims, the biggest of all is that its named after the Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. His cursed body simply refused to stay buried so the Romans brought it here around AD/CE 37-39. In…
Pilatus Bahn 130 #2
How a railway was built up Pilatus: This continues from the first part of the Pilatusbahn feature celebrating its 130th anniversary. No doubt the idea of a railway up Pilatus has a fairly substantial history. The earliest was a sort of wooden tramroad, or rolling railway, which transported logs and…
Pilatus Bahn 130
The Pilatus Bahn at 130. Switzerland’s famous rack railway and the steepest example in the world opened to the public on 4th June 1889. The line uses a unique patent of rack rail devised by Eduard Locher who realised the normal types of rack railway would not be able to…
Driving thro rail tunnels for fun!
Whilst researching the Gotthard Bahn the other week I got this idea for a couple of ‘road trips’ through some railway tunnels. Generally no-one can just drive cars through any railway tunnels, but what I am about to discuss is very different! Take for example the Schöllenen railway. Some of…
A Welsh mountain railway’s Catalonia twin
It’s often been thought the locomotives for the Snowdon Mountain Railway were a one-off batch from the SLM works at Winterthur, Switzerland. However further locomotives were built alongside the 1922 and 1923 builds for Snowdon (No.6 Sir Harmood/Padarn, No.7 Aylwyn/Ralph and No.8 Eryri) and these additional builds were acquired by…