Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

306 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. THE JUNGFRAU RAILWAY APPROACHING THE EIGER. the sea, and if the extra cost of working over this altitude, as com- pared with that of a tunnel, be capitalized and added to the cost of construction, the outlay will still be less than one-half that of a tunnel railway. The passage of the mountain will be made in less than two hours, and as there will be no difficulty in running as many trains upon this as on the existing Mont Cenis line, the traffic-carrying capacity of the Monginevra will be equal to that of Mont Cenis. THE JUNGFRAU RAILWAY. We now pass over some forty years to the construction of the latest addition to the many peak- climbing Swiss rack railways — that which ascends from Kleine Scheidegg on the Lauterbrunnen-Grindelwald or Wengeralp track to Eismeer station, cut in the rock of the western face of the Eiger, at an elevation of 10,368 feet above sea- A Railway to a Moun- tain Peak. level. Ultimately the rails will be carried within 300 feet of the sum- capital for the summit line would be but £1,650,000, as against £5,300,000 for the tunnel. It is interesting to notice here a present- day project for making a Fell-system railway over the Monginevra Pass, from Oulx to Brian9on, to place Turin and all the northern part of Italy in direct communication with the south and east of France and with the port of Marseilles. This important cbject will be effected by a mountain railway a little more than 25 miles long, at a cost of about £660,000. The summit-level of the pass is 6,061 feet above Project for another Pass Surface Railway. mit of the Jungfrau, the most beautiful of the Swiss mountains, and a lift will transfer travellers to the topmost point of th© peak to enjoy what has been pronounced the finest view in the world. Three schemes for leading a rack railway to a spot still accessible only to the practised mountaineer were first mooted in 1890, and were all shelved by the Swiss The Scheme Legislature. Three years later M. Adolph Guyer-Zeller, a Zurich manu- facturer, propounded a plan for making use of the recently opened Wengeralp Railway, referred to above, as a means of approach, and for constructing from Scheidegg a track