Lux Absio Bervatum

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Funiculars

I loved The Grand Budapest Hotel. It has a ton of clever little details. One I especially enjoyed was the funicular. Which is sort of like a winch-powered train car on a track with a relatively constant incline. There's this really cool one in Austria called the Lärchwandschrägaufzug. It has the widest gauge of any track in the world (supposedly). The rails are 8,200 mm apart (standard is 1,435 mm). You can read about it on the German Wikipedia page, but the Google Translate version is pretty clunky so either brush up on your deutschenspeaken or be ready to do some lesennavigieren.

The butchered translation is kind of fun to wade through:
In the year 1941 was of the company Waagner-Biro on today's route as an inclined elevator access for the construction of the power plant Glockner-Kaprun built.