Water carved this corridor stone by stone, and it hasn't stopped since.
Rothorn Bahn
Steam and coal smoke drifting up a mountainside above Lake Brienz.
The Brienz Rothorn Bahn has climbed the same 7.6 kilometres since 1892. It is not electrified. Steam locomotives push the carriages up the rack, huffing and screeching, the way they did more than a century ago. The line uses the Abt rack system and runs on an 800 millimetre gauge, narrow and slow by design. The journey to the summit takes about an hour. It ends at 2,244 metres, on the Brienzer Rothorn, the highest point reached by any steam railway in Switzerland. Below lies Lake Brienz, turquoise and long. Beyond it, the peaks of the Bernese Oberland. Trains run only from June to late October, when the pass is clear. The rest of the year the mountain keeps its own counsel.
