Читать книгу 155 - Hubertus Godeysen - Страница 6

Kaprun, summer 1994

"What a mess," says the hydraulic technician, lying on his back and looking through a small hole at the legs of two electricians above him in the attendant’s compartment. "How am I supposed to lay pipes here?"

The only answer from above is unintelligible muttering.

This isn’t how Hans Unterweger had imagined his day. For weeks, he’s been working in Kaprun on the undercarriage of the train. With two colleagues, he’s laying hydraulic oil pipes in the steel skeleton. Four independent systems. The job is almost done. The only thing missing is the train itself, constructed that summer less than 200 kilometers away in Oberweis in the Salzkammergut. Today, the giant package arrived in Kaprun, two 15-meter-long trains made of steel, aluminum, polystyrene, and fiberglass-reinforced plastic. Everything is ready. The body of the train should fit right onto the running gear like a lid on a pot.

The old railway on the Schmiedinger Kees (as the glacier on the Kitzsteinhorn mountain is known) is getting on in years. In the 1970s, it was considered a wonder of engineering, connecting seamlessly with the Tauern power plants on the eastern side of the Kitzsteinhorn. The two reservoir dams high in the Alps, Limberg and Moserboden, had become a national legend, a symbol of Austria’s reconstruction after the Second World War.

In 1964, a cable car started taking people to the glacier via the Salzburger Hütte. Skiing boomed at the time of the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, and often there was no way to cope with the sheer number of visitors. It only made things worse that the cable car couldn’t run during a storm. In that case, the skiers either never made it up the mountain, or they were stuck at 2450 meters. There is a long list of people who thought they could ignore all the warnings and prohibitions, tried to hike down to the valley on their own, and died. There’s no descending path here—just rock faces, slippery, steep meadows, and no place to get a foothold.

The railway, constructed between 1972 and 1974, was supposed to make these problems a thing of the past. The glacier would be open to mass tourism and visitors could travel there and back in any weather. A bold plan—an unprecedented masterpiece. A tunnel 3.3 kilometers long with an average incline of almost 50 percent, and a maximum incline of 57 percent at the top station. The new railway is designed to reach a maximum speed of ten meters per second. That means it would take only eight minutes to go from 911 meters above sea level in the valley to 2450 at the glacier.

So Unterweger, the hydraulic technician, has a big responsibility. He’s doing open-heart surgery on the funicular railway’s safety system. If the cable were to snap and the train started falling down the tunnel, his hydraulic emergency brake would kick in automatically with 190 bars of high pressure, literally stopping the train in its tracks. It could keep a whole herd of elephants from falling.

"Sleek piece of work," he thought when he first saw the new train hanging from the crane. The railway had shed its old image of clunky, angular metal trim for a new signature style of elegant curves. "Check it out—Kaprun is getting up to date!"

Eight minutes to the glacier, in a vehicle that compares favorably with the French TGV or the German ICE. Admittedly, not nearly as fast, but it climbs like a mountain goat. One of the two trains is actually called "Kitzsteingams" ("Kitzstein Chamois"). The other has the rather mysterious name of "Gletscherdrache" ("Glacier Dragon").

That morning, the new Kitzsteingams was positioned precisely to the millimeter on its old steel skeleton. Everything fits—except Unterweger and his hydraulics. In the place where the experienced technician is supposed to lay his measuring line from the chassis to the pressure gauges in the console, there’s no room.

He squeezes out from under the train with a groan, climbs the ladder, and sees the two electricians still standing in the attendant’s cab. They’re whispering, avoiding his gaze.

"Guys, there’s a fan heater in the way where my lines are supposed to go. It’s just sticking out of the console in the cab."

"I know," says one of the electricians, annoyed. "They said there’s enough space for the lines. You just have to route them around the heater."

"I’m supposed to custom design this with a heater in the way?" the hydraulic technician snaps back, "You can’t be serious. I don’t even have room to move around, let alone install pipes."

"Calm down," says the electrician soothingly. "We’ll take the heater out, then you’ll have room to move." He nods at his fellow electrician.

"How did the heater even get there?" asks the hydraulic tech, still indignant. "I mean, right where my lines are supposed to go?"

"They didn’t get the right fan heater at the company in Upper Austria where the train was assembled. So they got this one and sank it into the wall of the console."

"But why sink it in? Every fan heater has a suspension device. You just have to mount it on the wall, without all this taking things apart and screwing them together. And I’d have room for my lines."

"That was the plan, but it didn’t work. If they’d hung the heater up, the attendant wouldn’t have been able to open the door to the cab. So they took it apart and screwed it into the wall."

"Well, bravo," says Unterweger, "Quite a plan you’ve all come up with there."