2026-09-14 · 6 min read
In praise of the switchback
A rack railway could climb straight up. Ours doesn't, and the reason is older than the railway.
A rack railway could climb straight up the face of a mountain. Cog wheels do not care about scenery; they care about gradient, and a direct line would have shortened the Panorama Line by nearly two kilometres and cut nine minutes off the journey. The 1911 survey contains such a line, drawn in blue ink, labelled and costed, and then quietly abandoned.
The reason it was abandoned is written in the margin of the same survey, in a different hand: the cheese route. Before the railway, the summer cheese came down the mountain on mule tracks, and the mule tracks crossed the face of the Sonnenberg at the places where the ground let you walk. The blue line crossed the places where the rock did not care what the ground let you do.
So the railway followed the mules. Every switchback on the line today sits where a switchback in the mule track sat, because the first engineers understood something that is easy to forget a century later: the mountain already had an opinion about where people should walk, and the opinion had been paid for.
The switchbacks cost nine minutes and earn more than that. They are why the rack passes the high meadow at all, why the crossing loop at Treeline sits in open larch instead of a rock chute, and why the driver's thirty-second stop at the meadow curve happens at the one place the valley arranges itself into a postcard. Efficiency would have bought a faster view of nothing.
The next time the timetable is redrawn, someone will propose the blue line again. Someone always does. The answer will be the same one, and it will fit in a margin.