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into the small hours to sketch out a plan for project.
Permission was granted the following year for the
undertaking – which used a slightly different method
of electricity distribution to ensure the train would
be reliably powered in the harsh environment – and
construction started in 1896. Guyer-Zeller thought it
would take eight years to complete; in fact, it took 16
years and the inventor died before it was finished.
The three adjacent mountains of the Eiger, Mönch
and Jungfrau had already exercised an almost
magnetic draw for generations of travellers and
climbers. The Jungfrau was first climbed in 1811, five
years before Lord Byron stayed at Wengernalp and
“heard the avalanches falling every five minutes nearly
– as if God was pelting the Devil down fromHeaven
with snowballs”. The long poem his visit inspired,
Manfred
, encouraged growing numbers of tourists to
the region, mostly from Britain. In fact, the early ski
clubs there were usually founded by Britons, who were
also the first to climb many Swiss peaks.
TO STAND ATOP THE
Jungfrau and feast the eyes
on a white world of snow and ice is an experience
akin to high drama. Europe’s longest glacier snakes
away from the mountain in spectacular fashion, the
cold takes your breath away and the wind chill can
freeze the cheeks in minutes. Until a century ago, only
mountaineers could witness this scene of nature at
its most majestic, but since the opening of a railway
to Jungfraujoch in 1912, millions have been drawn
to that panorama over the Bernese Oberland at over
3,400m, known as “the Top of Europe”.
It had seemed an impossible dream. The idea of
a railway to take people up the Jungfrau had been
talked about for decades and dismissed by successive
engineers as completely impractical. But then, in
August 1893, the engineer and entrepreneur Adolf
Guyer-Zeller had an epiphany while he was hiking in
the mountains with his daughter. That night, inspired
by an alpine railway he’d seen that day, he worked
54
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TRAVELLER
Construction of the
train tunnels,
expected to take
seven or eight
years, began in
1896 and finished
16 years later
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