On Saturday October 29th, the Swiss Rhaetian Railway claimed the record for the world’s longest passenger train with a trip along one of the most spectacular tracks in the Swiss Alps. The entire trip took more than an hour. It traveled about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) through the Alps. Rhaetian Railway director Renato Fasciati said the record attempt was intended to highlight some of Switzerland‘s engineering achievements and celebrate 175 years of the European nation’s railroads.
The 1.9-kilometer (1.2-mile) long train consists of 100 cars and traveled the Albula/Bernina route from Preda to Bergün. UNESCO designated the route as a World Heritage Site in 2008 and it passes through 22 tunnels – some of which spiral through mountains – and 48 bridges, including the curved Landwasser Bridge.
The first Swiss train, which started running on August 7th, 1847 between Zurich and Baden became famous with a curious nickname: ‘Spanisch Brötli Bahn’. The Spanish pastry train. The Spanisch Brötli is a pastry specialty from Baden, although the original recipe came from Milan, when this area of Italy was under Spanish rule (1535-1706). It is a pastry made of puff pastry with a high proportion of butter, filled with a mixture of roasted and crushed hazelnuts and apricot jam.
As the Swiss and Austrian Education Council explains, after the Protestant Reformation, bakers in Zurich were forbidden to produce fancy pastries, so the servants of the leading families had to travel early in the morning to Baden, 25 km away, to buy the pastries in the morning so that they could be served as fresh as possible for Sunday breakfast. When the railroad between northern Zurich and Baden opened in 1847, the Spanisch Brötli traveled from Baden to Zurich in just 45 minutes. This use of the railroad was so popular that the railway line was quickly dubbed the ‘Spanisch Brötli Bahn’.
August marked the 175th anniversary of the first railroad line in Switzerland, with that train actually being called the Schweizerische Nordbahn. Switzerland consisted of a confederation of member states where each canton exercised its sovereignty in quasi-autonomy.
In 1838, the Basel-Zürcher-Eisenbahngesellschaft railway company had already been founded, but it was liquidated after three years due to financial problems. A Zurich industrialist, Martin Escher-Hess, rescued the remaining assets from bankruptcy, which served as the basis for the connection between Zurich and Baden.
The first trains ran in Switzerland in 1844, but belonged to the Compagnie de Strasbourg in Basel. These trains from Strasbourg only ‘stepped on’ Swiss territory to cover the two kilometers between Saint-Louis and Basel. The first steam locomotive that entered Basel bore the name of Napoleon.
