Elsbeth Rohr
Chief dispatcher
Thirty-one years on the levers at Falzgrund. Knows the mountain by the sound of the rack.
A railway, not a ride
About
High Spur Railway is a fictional rack railway and this site is a design portfolio piece. The identity is "Signal Box": Swiss wayfinding in bone white and charcoal with a single signal red, Archivo signage type against Schibsted Grotesk, and a split-flap departure board that turns in real time. Every name, price, mountain, and person on this site is invented.
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years of service
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metres climbed
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kilometres of rack
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percent max gradient
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Three names you would meet
A fictional railway still needs someone to run it, and the fiction is better for knowing who.
Matteo Zanetti
Head of traction
Keeps six cars and two ploughs running. Objects to the phrase 'it's only a railway'.
Vreni Caduff
Stationkeeper, Sattelhorn
Opens the summit at dawn, closes the tea room, reads the wind for tomorrow's board.
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What this site is
For the record, since a portfolio piece should be honest about its own seams.
Static, no frameworks
Plain HTML, one CSS file, one script. OKLCH colour tokens, a 4-point spacing scale, and two self-hosted variable fonts: Archivo (weight 100-900, width 62-125%) and Schibsted Grotesk (weight 400-900). No cookies, no analytics, no trackers, no third-party fonts.
Motion, with manners
Scroll-driven reveals with an IntersectionObserver fallback, staggered entrances, view-transition page fades, and the split-flap board. Everything is disabled under prefers-reduced-motion.
Fiction, labelled
The notice strip at the top of every page, this page, and the machine-readable llms.txt file all say it plainly: no trains, tickets, or places are real, and the forms send nothing to anyone.