In 1899, a Swiss city built a railway powered by wastewater; wastewater makes one car heavy enough to pull the other uphill without using a motor

Fribourg is a Swiss city split by a steep hill. In the 1890s, workers living in the lower district had a hard daily climb to the jobs in the upper town. So a local brewery owner came up with an offbeat answer: a sewage-powered railroad. A feature published by the Swiss National Museum states that this funicular has been powered by wastewater for more than a century and has run on the same basic principle ever since, aside from a mid-1990s overhaul. It might sound strange, but the mechanics are simple. It is run by gravity and weight, not fuel or electricity.

A city split in two

The city sits at two very different heights. Its highest points reach 700 meters above sea level, while the Sarine River runs through the city at about 530 meters. By the late 1800s, the city was growing fast, with workers coming to the upper town to work at the new university and new factories. But most working families still lived down in Neuveville, the city's lower district, at a time when Fribourg's total population was only about 15,000, underscoring how much of a still-modest city depended on the crossing between its two halves.


Paul-Alcide Blancpain, a brewery owner who owned the Cardinal brewery in the newer part of town, pushed for a railroad connection between the two areas. In 1877, the first funicular in Switzerland opened in Lausanne, and in 1893 the authorities in Fribourg requested a license to build their own. It took years to get the approval, and construction did not start until March 1898, by the Bern ironworks company Von Roll.

Wastewater: An unlikely engine

Steam power and electricity were completely ignored. Instead, the builders hooked the railroad directly to the city sewer system. Under each car was a large tank, and when a car arrived at the upper station, workers filled the tank with about 2700 liters of wastewater. The extra weight made the car heavier than the one waiting at the bottom station.

There was a steel cable, two and a half centimeters thick, running over a pulley at the top and linking the two cars. When it got heavy enough, gravity pulled the upper car down the hill and, as it fell, the cable hauled the lower car behind it, carrying up to 20 passengers at a time. As each car reached the bottom, it was drained of its tank, and the cycle started over for the next trip. The track itself is 121 meters long with a 54 percent gradient, steep enough for gravity to do the pulling.

A working railway from day one

On February 4, 1899, the Federal Council of Switzerland gave the green light for the official opening of the funicular. It cost around CHF 140,000 to build, a hefty amount in those days. In its first full year of service, 1900, it carried 174,776 passengers, and the operating company was turning a profit within a few years.

Ownership changed hands more than once since then. In 1965, the City of Fribourg took a controlling interest in the operator, and in 1977 the line was integrated into the town's public transport network. Today, it is run by the city's transit operator, TPF, which in 2024 marked the funicular's 125th anniversary. TPF called it, in a statement for the occasion, one of the last water-counterweight funiculars still operating in Europe, and a vital link between Fribourg's upper and lower districts.

Almost lost, then saved by the town

The funicular hasn’t always run smoothly. It broke an axle in 1996, and the Swiss Federal Office of Transport ordered a complete overhaul before it could reopen. City officials briefly considered scrapping the old system for a bus route or a modern inclined lift. But residents fought back, and thousands signed petitions to keep it in place. The city listened and spent almost CHF 2 million on renovations, and the funicular reopened on July 3, 1998, mostly restored to its original 19th-century design. The cars are still painted the same green as they always were, and the system still runs on filtered wastewater today, just like it did in 1899.

That choice was important. The line is listed in the Swiss inventory of cultural property of national importance, a heritage status that prevents major changes to the line, according to Fribourg's tourism office. It's also, the office notes, one of the reasons the funicular still needs no fuel to run: any modernization that swapped in an engine would break the very design the heritage listing protects.

A simple idea, ahead of its time

More than 125 years later, the Fribourg funicular still climbs the same hill it always has. It's just old pipes and gravity and 19th-century engineering. In an era when cities are looking for new ways to cut energy use, this old Swiss railroad is a reminder that some smart ideas were never really new. Sometimes the simplest systems of the past are the ones we should keep around.