"I Saw a Very Bright Dragon with Flapping Wings ..."

There are two ways to get to the top of Mount Pilatus: take the gondola, or take the cog wheel train. I did both -- I took the gondola on the way up and the cog wheel train on the way down. Mount Pilatus rises nearly 7000 ft just outside of Luzern and provides an imposing backdrop for the town.

 

 Cog wheel trains

The cog wheel train on Mount Pilatus is not only the steepest in Switzerland, but the steepest in the whole world!  Regular railway trains are limited to shallow inclines because otherwise the wheels would slip and he train would slide down the hill and possibly derail, which would be catastrophic. Heavy freight trains are limited to a 1.5% grade. Fast passenger trains can handle up to a maximum of a 5% grade. For steeper grade you have to use a different type of train. That's where cog wheel trains come in. They use additional cog wheels to ride on a corresponding toothed rail in the center of the track.

This method allows trains to climb tracks as steep as 25%. But Mount Pilatus is even steeper than that, approaching a 50% grade in places! For this, they had to use a different horizontal cog system, and the car itself is stepped, so that each row of seats is on a different level.

Dragons

Like many mountains in Europe, this one is associated with a medieval legend of dragons (see below). They are continuing to milk the legend even today; with a zipline called the "Dragon Glide" and even the logo for the mountain is a dragon.

Dragon logo of Mount Pilatus

The full eyewitness account of the dragon:

In 1619 as I was contemplating the serene sky by night, I saw a very bright dragon with flapping wings go from a cave in a great rock in the mount called Pilatus toward another cave, known as Flue, on the opposite side of the lake. Its wings were agitated with much celerity; its body was long as well as its tail and neck. Its head was that of a serpent with teeth, and when it was flying, sparks were coming out of it like the embers thrown by an incandescent iron when struck by smiths on an anvil. At first, I thought it was a meteor, but after observing more closely, (I saw) it was truly a dragon from the recognizable motion of the members. This I write to you, your reverence, in case you should doubt that dragons truly exist in nature.

-- Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus, quo universae denique naturae divitiae (Amsterdam 1664-1668).