Semmering Railway

The first mountain railway in Europe built to standard gauge, and commonly called the world’s first true mountain railway for the terrain and the height it had to master. Some 20,000 workers built it between 1848 and 1854 under Carl von Ghega, born in Venice to an Albanian family. It has fourteen tunnels, the summit tunnel runs 1,431 metres, sixteen viaducts, several of them two-storey, over a hundred stone arch bridges and eleven small iron ones. Across forty-one kilometres it climbs 460 metres, and stations were often built from the spoil dug out of the tunnels.