The cog railway up Rigi

The Vitznau–Rigi-Bahn has been climbing this mountain since 1871 — the first cog railway in Europe. A toothed rack runs up the middle of the track and a gear under the carriage bites into it, hauling the whole red box up gradients no ordinary train could hold. It is a beautifully single-minded piece of engineering: one problem — get people up a mountain, safely, forever — solved so well it simply kept running for a century and a half.

At the top the cloud broke and the Alps came out in ranks, blue and endless, laid along the whole horizon and reflected back in the carriage windows.

There is something reassuring about a machine that old still doing its one job on its original rails. You wind it up in the valley; it delivers you to the summit. The kind of thing I’d like to build.