Rhätische Bahn AG (RhB)

Updated: August 2026 – Hardly any railway in Europe has been photographed as often as the Rhätische Bahn. That has less to do with its vehicles than with what it runs on: viaducts spanning entire valleys, and tunnels that loop back on themselves inside the mountain. This page explains why the routes look the way they do – and what that means in practice for sightings and photos.

What is the Rhätische Bahn?

Rhätische Bahn AG (RhB) is the railway company of the canton of Graubünden. It operates a connected narrow-gauge network, runs regional, tourist and freight trains on it – and operates the tracks it runs on itself. Two of its lines, the Albula and the Bernina, are listed as UNESCO World Heritage.

This dual role matters for identification in the field: a railway undertaking, which runs trains, is usually kept separate from a railway infrastructure manager, which owns the network. With the Swiss narrow-gauge railways, the two roles frequently coincide – as with the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn and the Zentralbahn too.

Recognising it in the field: vehicle, data panel, surroundings

Spiral tunnels, viaducts, galleries: why the routes are built this way

A railway can only cope with gradients within narrow limits. Where a road simply gets steeper, an adhesion railway instead has to gain length: the more metres of track per metre of height gained, the flatter the ramp. This is exactly what produces the structures the RhB is famous for.

Structure	What it does	How to recognise it
Helical spiral tunnel	gains height inside the mountain on a small footprint	the train disappears into the portal and reappears higher up
Open-air spiral loop	the same principle, but out in the open	the route crosses over itself or runs twice through the valley
Viaduct	crosses a valley without losing height	masonry or concrete arches, often on a curve
Avalanche gallery	protection against rockfall and avalanches	a half-open concrete structure along the slope
Retaining wall and cutting	routing along a steep slope	the track visibly cut into the mountainside

The best-known individual structure is the Landwasser Viaduct, which on a curve leads directly into a tunnel cut into the rock. It shows the principle in its purest form: the route doesn’t take the shortest path but the one that keeps the gradient manageable. The corresponding photo spot at Filisur is accordingly the most visited on the whole network.

Once you can tell these structures apart, you can read a mountain route almost like a plan. Two levels stacked above each other in the same valley basin almost always mean a spiral loop. A gallery tells you the slope above is considered at risk. And a long viaduct at the start of a valley means the railway wanted to hold its height here rather than descend.

The Albula line near Bergün is a good place to practise, where loops, galleries and viaducts sit close together over just a few kilometres. The Albula Railway Museum shows the construction history of this line on site. The southern side of the network provides the counter-example: at Tirano on the Bernina line, a route ends that solves the same problem with almost none of these engineering structures.

What this means in practice for photography and sightings

On a mountain route, it isn’t the focal length that decides the picture but the location – and it’s rarely reachable on the spur of the moment. Engineering structures sit in inaccessible terrain, and good sightlines often run along hiking paths with a significant climb.

Three practical rules follow from that. First: plan the location beforehand, not on the spot. Second: add together the walking time to the viewpoint and the way back to the last connection. Third: expect backlight, because valleys are narrow and the sun disappears behind the ridge early. The general basics for this are in the guide taking good photos of trains, and the basic rules on distance are in the rules on safe distance from the track.

Logging sightings so they’re worth something

“Saw an RhB train” isn’t a sighting. On a network with a small number of vehicle classes that stay in service for a long time, an observation only becomes useful with three pieces of information: vehicle number, exact location and time. The location can happily be more precise than the station name – on mountain routes, several hundred metres of altitude can lie between two spots.

Also add the train formation: is it a single power car, a train with a driving trailer, or are freight wagons included? Details like these make the difference later when you want to compare diagrams. How to build this up systematically is shown in the guide to keeping a sighting logbook.

Common mix-ups

A common mistake concerns the technology: not every Swiss mountain railway uses a rack system. Rack vehicles such as the HGe 4/4 or the ABeh 8/12 “Orion” railcar belong to other networks. And anyone who sees a Re 460 in front of a long-distance train in the Rhine valley is on the standard-gauge network – a different system that only touches the narrow-gauge railway.

Another mix-up arises with tourist trains that run over the networks of several railways. A train name then tells you nothing about the operating company. The Montreux Oberland Bernois Railway works in a similar way, its panoramic services also marketed across network boundaries.

Conclusion

The Rhätische Bahn is the rare case where the infrastructure is more famous than the vehicle. Anyone who can tell a spiral tunnel, a viaduct and a gallery apart understands not just this railway but every mountain route – and ends up making better decisions about where to stand.