The Furka steam train
A steam train waiting at Gletsch, at the foot of the Rhône glacier, its smoke in the wind.
When the rails reach Gletsch, before the war of 1914, the hotelier Joseph Seiler runs the grand hotel there at the foot of the glacier, a stop for the horse-drawn coaches. According to Wikipedia, he gives up land for the track on one condition: at noon the trains will wait an hour, long enough for the travellers to sit down to lunch, and the evening trains will stay the night at Gletsch. On the map, the train never leaves again. Seiler would have loved it.
A line that hibernates
The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland tells of a line born the hard way. Two federal concessions, in 1907 and 1908, plan to join Brig to Disentis by way of Gletsch, on narrow gauge; the company, founded in 1910, lives mostly on French money. The 1.8 km tunnel under the crest defeats the workers, the money runs out from 1916 and bankruptcy comes in 1923. A new company, founded in Brig, buys everything up and runs steam from end to end in 1926. Electrified in the early 1940s, the line stays shut seven months a year, according to Wikipedia: because of avalanches, stretches of the overhead wire have to come down every autumn. In 1982 a base tunnel 15.4 km long, dug under the Furka, takes its place all year round. The last train crosses the pass in October 1981.
Rebuilt by volunteers
In 1983, enthusiasts gathered at the Swiss Museum of Transport refuse to see the track torn up. In 1985 their association gives rise to the Dampfbahn Furka-Bergstrecke, a non-profit company that reopens the line piece by piece: from Realp in 1992, as far as Gletsch in 2000, then on to Oberwald in 2010. Its locomotives have come a long way: sold off in the 1940s, they worked in Vietnam, where four are found again in 1988. Bought back in 1990, two of them, “Furkahorn” and “Gletschhorn”, take on the mountain again in 1993. Almost 18 km long, with gradients of up to 118 per thousand on the rack, it holds a record: no line without overhead wires is longer in Switzerland. In 2020, SRF reports, 21 volunteer drivers and eight firemen ran the engines, and one of them drove the locomotive his great-grandfather had already driven.
On the map
The map keeps only a short single-track stretch of the line, on the floor of the Gletsch valley. A single train waits there, a locomotive and two coaches, beside a halt. The train stands still, its locomotive facing down the valley, and only its smoke moves. The climb to the pass, its tunnel and the rack are not there; the real train runs from Realp to Oberwald, on a line that still has to close every winter. The vehicles on the map are there for play: they keep to no timetable and don’t show where the real ones are. To travel, check the official timetables; and if you’d like the map to do more, write to us, our links are at the top of the page.
Sources: Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, article “Furka-Oberalp (FO)”; Wikipedia, articles “Ligne sommitale de la Furka” (French), “Furka Steam Railway” and “Gletsch” (German); SRF, “Jubiläum der Furka-Dampfbahn” (2020).