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Ricken
795 m
St. Gallen
The Ricken is a low Toggenburg pass of about 805 metres, linking Wattwil in the Thur valley with the Linth lowlands around Kaltbrunn and Uznach, with the small pass village of Ricken at its top.
795 m
St. Gallen
The Ricken is a low Toggenburg pass of about 805 metres, linking Wattwil in the Thur valley with the Linth lowlands around Kaltbrunn and Uznach, with the small pass village of Ricken at its top.
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DESCRIPTION
The Ricken is a low Toggenburg pass of about 805 metres, linking Wattwil in the Thur valley with the Linth lowlands around Kaltbrunn and Uznach, with the small pass village of Ricken at its top. For centuries a modest trade and post route climbed over it – but the pass owes its real fame to what runs beneath it. To carry the new railway from the Linth into the Toggenburg, engineers bored the Ricken Tunnel under the pass between 1904 and 1910 – at 8.6 kilometres, laid out dead straight on an even gradient the whole way, one of the longest in the country.
That gradient, and the tunnel's lack of adequate ventilation, gave it a grim reputation among railwaymen in the age of steam, as smoke gathered and lingered in the bore. Then disaster struck. On 4 October 1926 a steam-hauled freight train, burning poor-quality briquettes, stalled while climbing the gradient deep inside the tunnel; nine railway employees died of carbon-monoxide poisoning, among them three of the rescuers. The catastrophe forced the line's immediate electrification, with electric trains running by May 1927, and steam was banished from the Ricken. Today the road over the top is a quiet country pass, while electric trains – the Voralpen-Express among them – slip silently through the mountain below.
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