Located at a thousand meters altitude, the Metro in Serfaus Austria is far most the shortest line in the world. Its inhabitants have to travel an hour and a half to the city which is Innsbruck.
But you may be asking why a locality in the Alpes of at least a thousand inhabitants has a metro line?
For most of you, the answers come immediately for tourism. Serfaus is the typical Town at foot of the ski Station which lives from the thousands of skiers that visit the place during the snow months which are from 4 - 5 months during the year. There are at least 50 hotels which are 5,000 beds available.
How the metro idea born in Serfaus?
Next to the little plateau where the town is there is a ridge of 3,000 meters high (9843 ft). 198 kilometers of ski tracks with 70 lifts that are waiting for skiers at the hillside. The rise of tourism in the '70s provoked a traffic collapse that ended 4 o 5 streets away from the town. The hall answer to that problem was to prohibit cars in the town area and inaugurated a bus service between the parking lots recently built for that purpose. Nevertheless, that did not resolve the problem since they had to deal with the great number of passenger trips simultaneously.
After studying various solutions for the problem including a train, they came out with an underground funicular with some stations in between.
Serfaus Metro (Dorfbahn)
Serfaus Dorfbahn techinical data
This post first appeared on ITravy For Travel Tips, News, Inspiration And More, please read the originial post: here