Why
Swiss steam is back
on the
rails
By Anthony Lambert
5:00 PM Tuesday Jul 24, 2012 New Zealand Herald
Anthony Lambert takes a trip on a lovingly-restored cogwheel steam
locomotive route through the Swiss Alps.
A
steam locomotive negotiates the Steinstafelviadukt on the picturesque Dampfbahn
Furka-Bergstrecke in Switzerland. Photo / Creative Commons image by Wikimedia
user David Gubler
Tran Dinh Hung travelled
8850 kilometres because of his childhood dream. He came to Switzerland from his
native Vietnam to work on the steam locomotives his father drove before the
Vietnam War.
"Every day I saw
him on a steam locomotive and heard the beautiful sound from the locomotive. So
I wanted to follow him when I grew up."
But, after the war, the
railway into the mountains at Da Lat remained closed and the Swiss-built
engines languished in a jungle embrace.
Then in 1990 Hung was
given the job by Vietnam Railways of helping a dozen Swiss volunteers move the
derelict locos 120km to Ho Chi Minh City for shipment to Hamburg and, finally,
Switzerland, as part of the revival of a remarkable line between Realp and
Oberwald. Now retired, he was on his third visit to work on the railway when I
met him last August.
Until 1982, this section
of line was one of the highlights - and highest point - of the Glacier Express
line between St Moritz and Zermatt. Then a 14.5km "base tunnel", cut
through the foot of the mountain, opened which permits year-round operation.
Previously, the threat
of avalanches forced closure from October to late May. Indeed, one bridge had
to be dismantled every autumn to prevent it being swept away.
Ordinarily, once the
new, faster, year-round route opened, the old line would have been forgotten.
But a group of Swiss railway buffs thought this section was too impressive to
lose.
It offered the
experience of climbing to the Furka Tunnel at 2160 metres and seeing the Rhone
Glacier across the valley. So they set up a body in 1983 to save it.
The practical and
financial challenges were so great most dismissed the idea but, section by
section, the Dampfbahn Furka-Bergstrecke (DFB)
was rebuilt.
The DFB reopened last
month for its short season, with daily trains until mid-August followed by
Friday and weekend services into October.
The Rhone Glacier itself
has been admired since the start of Swiss tourism. In 1836, the poet Henry
Longfellow described the great tongue of ice that spawned the Rhone River as
"lying like a glove with its palm downwards, and the fingers crooked and
closed - a gauntlet of ice which centuries ago winter threw down in defiance of
the Sun".
Visitors back then came
by horse-drawn postbus to the hamlet of Gletsch, lost among the mountains, to
walk to the glacier.
Later in the 19th
century, two hotels were built overlooking the glacier; the now-closed
Belvedere which featured in the 1964 James Bond filmGoldfinger,
and the huge Glacier du Rhone Hotel of 1860, which the 1895
Baedeker travel guide book described as "first class but not quite
satisfactory in some respects".
Some might say the same
today, chiefly because there are no en-suite bathrooms - but I found it a
delightful step back in time.
The hotel's livelihood
was threatened when the railway arrived in 1914, but the savvy owner insisted
that in return for giving his land for the railway, midday trains would stop
for lunch and evening trains would stay the night. So, a cavernous dining hall
with brass chandeliers was built to augment the more intimate dining-room. It
still fills up with the cyclists, bikers and motorists who converge on Gletsch
from the Goms Valley and the Furka and Grimsel passes, as well as the DFB's
passengers.
The DFB stations at
Realp and Oberwald are a few steps from the stations of the Matterhorn Gotthard
Bahn, which operates trains over the western part of the Glacier Express route
between Zermatt and Disentis.
A converted coach forms
the cafe at Realp where most passengers take a coffee or hot chocolate before
boarding the period-style carriages. First-class passengers sink into
upholstered seats while, in traditional manner, second-class passengers sit on
wooden slatted seats, but they are perfectly contoured for comfort.
The journey begins with
a blast on a pea whistle from Gerhard Bissinger, who had come from Hamburg to
act as a volunteer guard for a fortnight. The climb up the Furkareuss Valley
resembles a Scottish glen in its heather-clad slopes. Waterfalls and occasional
cows crop the hardy grasses. Huge boulders in the river hint of the perils of
spring melt and a rock the size of a tipper truck forms one wall of a cow barn.
Such gradients can be
climbed only with the help of a central rack rail, engaged by a cog on the
engine which lets it claw its way up the mountain. Having to maintain the rack
rail to a tolerance of one-12th of an inch is just one of the many
complications facing the DFB. Another is the 1.6km-long summit tunnel and the
expense of repairing the effect of freeze and thaw on the tunnel lining.
The western exit from
the tunnel is breathtaking, with roads that zig-zag up the mountain slopes to
the Furka and Grimsel passes, the distant buildings of Gletsch in the valley
and the lip of the Rhone Glacier. The pause at Gletsch is a chance to admire the
immaculate locomotive. Nearly all of them are centenarians, painted in blue or
black livery with plenty of brightly burnished steel and brass.
The final descent from
Gletsch to Oberwald begins in a spiral tunnel to allow the railway to corkscrew
down the mountain. It emerges to cross the Rhone and edge along the valley
slope in a forest of larch and firs, with campanula and saxifrage among them.
The risk of sparks
igniting the undergrowth prompted the DFB to install 84 trackside sprinklers
which are automatically set spinning by ascending trains.
As the train approaches
Oberwald, a view opens up along the broad Goms Valley, birthplace of the
"king of hoteliers", César Ritz.
The steam loco whispers
to a halt at Oberwald station where trains head west to Brig or east through
the Base Tunnel to Realp and on to Andermatt, taking just 21 minutes rather
than the 130 minutes of the old route.
Slow travel - but Tran
Dinh Hung and thousands every year savour every minute.
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