Story of the day: Riding the Jungfrau Express

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Given the snow today, I thought this one matched the mood.

It’s a story from the Telegraph about a winter-wonderland trip to Switzerland with my dad.

It appeared as a preview for the 150th anniversary of the Jungfrau Express, one of Europe’s great rail journeys.

Here’s an extract:

Italian miners first blasted through the mountain to Jungfraujoch on February 21, 1912, to complete the construction of the railway tunnel. They’d been trying since 1896.

The railway brought a new breed of genteel visitor to the Jungfrau region and, today, carries around 700,000 passengers per year.

Just getting to the train is quite a journey in itself. We changed trains first at Kleine Scheidegg, where ski runs whoosh beside the track in a blur of goggles and baby grows, and cable cars trundle overhead.

From here to Europe’s highest railway station at Jungfraujoch, located at an air-thinning altitude of 3,454m, the feat-of-engineering railway climbs cautiously through a tunnel at a steep gradient of one in four.

The story isn’t online via the publisher but I reproduced it on my old blog.

Read the full story, Riding the Memory Train.

And post your comments below.

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