Vitznau–Rigi railway line
railway line in Switzerland
The Vitznau–Rigi railway line is a Swiss standard gauge rack railway that runs from Vitznau on the shore of Lake Lucerne to Rigi. It was built in 1871 by the Rigibahn, and is now owned by Rigi Railways, along with the Arth–Rigi railway line, which runs on the other side of the mountain, and the Weggis–Rigi Kaltbad cable car (Luftseilbahn Weggis–Rigi Kaltbad, LWRK).
History
The Vitznau–Rigi railway (VRB) was opened on 21 May 1871 as the Rigibahn and the first mountain railway in Europe. The first rack railway of Europe had already been opened in the quarry of Ostermundigen in 1870. The quarry was officially opened for marketing reasons only in October 1871. The Vitznau–Rigi Railway was built by the engineers Niklaus Riggenbach, Ferdinand Adolf Naeff and Olivier Zschokke. At first it ran only from Vitznau (439 metres (1,440 ft) above sea level) via Kaltbad (1,453 metres (4,767 ft) ASL) to Rigi Staffelhöhe (1,550 metres (5,090 ft) ASL). On 27 June 1873, the railway was extended to Rigi Kulm (1,752 metres (5,748 ft) ASL). This section is located in the canton of Schwyz, for which the VRB had no concession. The track belonged to the ARB and was leased by the VRB. The line is mostly single track, but has been double-track since 1874 from the request stop of Freibergen to Rigi Kaltbad-First.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Vitznau–Rigi railway line” as railway line in Switzerland. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as railway line in Switzerland. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q675526. VIAF identifies the subject as 264546678. The Library of Congress control number is n85249987. Authority coordinates are 47.010, 8.483. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1871, 1870, 1873 and 1874.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vitznau–Rigi railway line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.