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.It was a daunting task.While the pass had been established as far back as the Middle Ages as a route for people and horses and it was the lowest of the Alpine crossings, it still required the railway to climb to 2,880 feet.After Ghega surveyed the route the scheme was given the go-ahead in 1848.It was not, however, the technical arguments which convinced the emperor of the necessity of the project, but the political situation.The revolutionary uprisings of that year across Europe had frightened the Austrian government, especially as growing unemployment in the country risked stimulating unrest.Establishing a cheap transport route to the sea from landlocked Vienna became an economic and political necessity.By then the Südbahn had covered the Austrian plains with its tracks and was ready for the ascent.The track on the Semmering had to be laid through thick forests on the side of precipitous mountains and across mountain ravines, perched perilously on boulder-strewn ledges which had to be protected by avalanche sheds and walls.The risks were made all too apparent when rocks sliding down the mountain killed fourteen men in one incident in October 1850.Ghega designed a route through the Alps between Gloggnitz (in Lower Austria) and Mürzzuschlag (in Styria), which was precisely twice as long as the thirteen miles that separated the two towns as the crow flies.This was an enterprise that required new and untried techniques, such as building sharply curved viaducts over the valleys and blasting huge tunnels out of the mountains.There were fifteen tunnels and sixteen viaducts, including the elegant Kalte Rinne Viaduct, with its ten arches resting on a smaller second set, made even more attractive by Ghega’s decision to use only bricks rather than iron and steel.All this was carried out largely by hand, with the help of much gunpowder, since no other explosives had yet been devised.Ghega limited the gradient to 1 in 40, but even that was too steep for contemporary locomotives and in 1851, a competition, similar to the Rainhill Trials for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, was organized on a completed mountainous section of the railway.But in the event, when the line opened two years later, all including the winner, the Bavaria, proved useless and a new type of locomotive was commissioned from Wilhelm Freiherr von Engerth, the professor of engineering at Graz University.4An accident just before the opening of the line almost changed history.The German representative was Otto von Bismarck, who would later become the Iron Chancellor and bring about the unification of Germany.Walking up the mountain to inspect a tunnel, he came within a whisker of being killed when a temporary gangway over a ravine broke beneath him and he only survived by clinging on to the ledge as he fell.Many of the workers on the site were not so fortunate.The death toll from accident and disease among the 20,000-strong workforce of Germans, Czechs and Italians was very high even by the lax standards of the day, and 700 perished, mostly from typhus and cholera, but also from accidents.To this day, each year on All Saints Day, Austria’s railway workers lay a wreath in their memory at the cemetery near the railway.The first freight was carried on the line in October 1853 and passenger traffic began in the following July.The all-important connection between Vienna and Trieste 5 was completed in 1857, and though the cost of the line was four times the original estimate it proved its worth as a vital trade link for the empire in its declining years.Like many early railways, the Semmering was completed with a bit of a flourish through the provision of fifty-two houses in classic style for the trackmen who were required to make continual checks to ensure the line remained safe.The robustness of Ghega’s design is demonstrated by the fact that most of the line survives virtually intact today as a main line, with very few alterations apart from being electrified in the 1950s, unlike several later Alpine routes which have either been closed or greatly modified.6Since Trieste was at the time part of the Austrian Empire, the Semmering was a domestic rather than an international railway
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