Niklaus Riggenbach

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Niklaus Riggenbach

Niklaus Riggenbach (born May 21, 1817 in Gebweiler (today: Guebwiller ) in Alsace ; citizen of Rünenberg ; † July 25, 1899 in Olten , Switzerland ) was a Swiss engineer , locomotive builder and inventor of the Riggenbach rack railway system (ladder rack) and the counter-pressure brake .

biography

Niklaus Riggenbach, whose family originally comes from Rünenberg in Switzerland ( Canton Basel-Landschaft ), was born in Gebweiler in Alsace in 1817. After the early death of his father, his mother moved with her eight minor children back to Switzerland , to Basel. At the age of 16, Niklaus Riggenbach began an apprenticeship as a mechanic and moved abroad after completing his apprenticeship. From Lyon , he traveled to Paris in 1837 , where he accepted a job. By attending evening classes, he acquired a great deal of knowledge in mathematics and physics. In 1839 he was at the opening of the Paris – St. Germain was there and recognized his new goal in life: from now on he wanted to devote himself to building locomotives.

Signature of Niklaus Riggenbach (1817–1899)
Signature of Niklaus Riggenbach, 1896

In June 1840 he moved to Karlsruhe and found a job in the Kessler machine factory . Here he soon rose to the position of foreman and manager. In this position he was involved in the construction of no fewer than 150 locomotives. One of these steam engines was the "Limmat", one of the first four locomotives of the Swiss Northern Railway , the so-called Spanish Brötli Railway , which opened on August 9, 1847 . He had to transfer this locomotive to Switzerland and test it on the Zurich - Baden line .

In November 1847 Riggenbach married the Basle Emma Socin (* 1824) in the Baden Binzen that it allows recruit school had graduated in the artillery and the call-up to Swiss territory Sonderbund campaign risked. Riggenbach's only son was born in 1848, but he did not follow in his father's footsteps, but became a pastor and university teacher.

When the construction of the Basel – Olten railway line began in 1853, the board of directors of the Swiss Central Railway Company elected him to head the machine shop that was originally to be built at the Basel train station. He went on business trips to England and Austria and examined many steam locomotives . Various improvements in the railroad industry bear his name. In 1856 he became machine master and head of the new main workshop of the Centralbahn, which was finally built in Olten , at the junction of the route network. Under his leadership, this workshop developed into one of the largest machine factories in the country. Among other things, locomotives, railroad cars and bridge elements were built here.

In a short time the number of workshop workers rose to over five hundred; Riggenbach recruited many from the surrounding cantons. Around three hundred workers and their families came to Olten from abroad. Riggenbach also wanted to offer them services and instruction to the children. Since the plan to hold church services in the Catholic Church was soon abandoned, Riggenbach organized a very well-attended church service on the day of prayer on September 19, 1858, in the hall of the workshop area, thus promoting the establishment of the Reformed parish in Olten.

Rigibahn shares dated December 31, 1889 signed by Niklaus Riggenbach
Contemporary description of a rack railway in the book "The entire natural sciences" published in 1873

The weak adhesion of the first locomotives on the steep Hauenstein line worried him. As a possible solution for mountain railways, Niklaus Riggenbach invented a rack railway . After many attempts, he found out that very steep stretches can be traveled safely if a toothed rack is built into which a toothed wheel of the locomotive engages between the rails of a track. On August 12, 1863, France granted him patent number 59625. From 1869 to 1871, together with the engineers Ferdinand Adolf Naeff and Olivier Zschokke, he built the Vitznau-Rigi-Bahn with its Riggenbach system as the first mountain railway in Europe. The mountain railway to Mount Washington , which was built shortly before the Rigibahn, used a similar rack railway system .

On Riggenbach's initiative, the Sälischlössli near Olten was rebuilt in 1870 . In 1871 he left the position of workshop manager to run a new factory for the International Mountain Railways Company in Aarau . In 1882 he built the Elevador do Bom Jesus in Portugal, which is still in operation. From 1883 he worked as a freelance engineer. From his office in Olten he planned various mountain railways in several continents. On December 4, 1893, he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris.

Niklaus Riggenbach died on July 25, 1899 at the age of 82. He had received honorary citizenship from the communities of Olten, Aarau and Trimbach. The tomb for Riggenbach was created based on a design by Jakob August Heer in 1901 for the grave on the former castle cemetery in Olten, which was closed around 1918, and is still in the same area today as a memorial for the railway engineer.

In 1943 a film about Riggenbach's life was planned with the title Höhenwärts! .

Autobiography

  • Niklaus Riggenbach: Memories of an old mechanic. In: Die Berner Woche , vol. 33, 1943. ( digitized version )
  • Niklaus Riggenbach: Memories of an old mechanic. Olten 1886. 5th edition: Rigibahn-Gesellschaft, Vitznau 1967. New edition: Birkenhalde, Winterthur 2009, ISBN 978-3-905172-55-3 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Niklaus Riggenbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Locomotives manufactured in the SCB main workshop in Olten  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ruedi Heutschi: Niklaus Riggenbach and the Evangelical Reformed congregation in Olten . In: Oltner Neujahrsblätter, Vol. 68, 2010, p. 30.
  2. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter R. Académie des sciences, accessed on February 21, 2020 (French).
  3. ^ Viktor Zwicky: Exposé on the film. Up! Schweizer Film = Film Suisse: official organ of Switzerland, accessed on June 21, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Riggenbach, Niklaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss engineer, inventor of the rack railway
DATE OF BIRTH May 21, 1817
PLACE OF BIRTH Gebweiler , Alsace
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1899
PLACE OF DEATH Olten