For this extra Thursday post we’re looking back at our trip two weeks ago today. Enjoy the photos (and the two videos!) that tell the tale of this recent, amazing, adventure …
In the last post we went to the top of Mt. Pilatus, a journey which took a bus, and two separate ski lift cars to get to the long, winding stairs that wound around the top and, finally, showed us the summit at 6,949 feet.
When you’re that high up, how do you get down? Well, this is the Golden Round Trip, so you do something a little bit scary and superlative.
You ride in the world’s steepest cogwheel railway. The gradient is, at one point, 48 percent! The steepness was a cost-saving measure from when the railway was built in 1889. The system was a special design because engineers worried the steepness would make the gear teeth jump. Most of the railway, in fact, is that original hardware.
The cars were steam until the 1930s, and these went in over the course of the ’70s. The spare controls are a giveaway. This is all that keeps this descent under control.
New cars are going in right now, and the upgrades will be completed in 2023. As for this day, I like to think that the engineer was a bit nervous about all of this.
This is the track he was peering down. His car travels from 5-7 miles per hour.
The descent takes about half an hour, and I’ve got three minutes of highlights for you here.
And here are two shots of the rock faces from the cogwheel car’s descent.
I must say, I enjoyed that an awful lot more than I thought I would. It was a unique sort of experience, to be sure.
I wonder who’s been up and down the mountain on the cogwheel car the most.
Near the end of that video, you caught a glimpse of a boat coming ashore. That was our next stop, and how we wrapped up the Golden Round Trip — aerial cableways and gondola to summit Mount Pilatus, world’s steepest cogwheel railway and, finally — a beautiful ride on Lake Lucerne, one of Switzerland’s largest lakes.
And here are two views from on the lake.
It’s difficult to believe, and more than a little sad, that our vacation was coming quickly to it’s end. After the boat ride it was back on the bus, and back to Zurich. There was dinner (we had barbecue, hipster-almost-Texas barbecue) and got ready for one last day of fun.
But you’ll have to come back tomorrow to find out what we did. (It’ll be worth seeing.)
