Mount Pilatus Golden Round Trip from Lucerne

The Pilatus cogwheel railway climbs at a gradient of 48 per cent. No rack railway anywhere is steeper, and when it opened in 1889 the engineers had to invent a new toothed system because the existing ones would have jumped the rack on that slope. The Golden Round Trip uses it as one leg of a loop that never repeats itself. You cross Lake Lucerne by boat to Alpnachstad, climb the mountain by cogwheel, and come down the far side by aerial cableway and panorama gondola into the suburb of Kriens. Pilatus was feared long before it was climbed. Medieval Lucerne banned people from going up, on the grounds that the lake near the summit held the restless ghost of Pontius Pilate and that disturbing it would bring storms down on the city. Dragons were reported here into the sixteenth century. Queen Victoria rode up on muleback in 1868, before the railway existed. At the top, two summits are walkable in a few minutes each, and the terrace looks over Lake Lucerne on one side and 73 Alpine peaks on the other. The cogwheel operates roughly May to November. In winter the loop is not possible and the mountain is reached by cable car from Kriens in both directions.