Curious sensations are produced by a ride up this remarkable line.  The seats of the cars are inclined like the boiler of the locomotive, and so long as the cars are on a level the seats tilt at an angle which renders it almost impossible to use them.  But when the start is made the frightful tilt places the body in an upright position, and, with the engine in the rear, the train starts up the hill with an easy, gliding motion, passing up the ascent, somewhat steeper than the roof of a house, without the slightest apparent effort.  But if the going up excites tremor, much more peculiar are the feelings aroused on the down grade.  The trip begins with a gentle descent, and all at once the traveler looking ahead sees the road apparently come an end.  On a nearer approach he is undeceived and observes before him a long decline which appears too steep even to walk down.  Involuntarily he catches at the seats, expecting a great acceleration of speed.  Very nervous are his feelings as the train approaches this terrible slope, but on coming to the incline the engine dips and goes on not a whit faster than before and not more rapidly on the down than on the up grade.  Many people are made sick by the sensation of falling experienced on the down run.  Some faint, and a few years ago one traveler, supposed to be afflicted with heart disease, died of fright when the train was going over the Schnurtobel bridge.  The danger is really very slight, there not having been a serious accident since the road was opened.  The attendants are watchful, the brakes are strong, but even with all these safeguards, men of the steadiest nerves cannot help wondering what would become of them in case anything went wrong.

Bold as was the project of a railroad on the Rigi, a still bolder scheme was broached ten years later, when a daring genius proposed a railroad up Mt.  Vesuvius.  A railroad up the side of an ordinary mountain seemed hazardous enough, but to build a line on the slope of a volcano, which in its eruption had buried cities, and every few years was subject to a violent spasm, seemed as hazardous as to trust the rails of an ordinary line to the rotten river ice in spring time.  The proposal was not, however, so impracticable as it looked.  While the summit of Vesuvius changes from time to time from the frequent eruptions, and varies in height and in the size of the crater, the general slope and contour of the mountain are about the same to-day as when Vesuvius, a wooded hill, with a valley and lake in the center of its quiescent crater, served as the stronghold of Spartacus and his rebel gladiators.  There have been scores of eruptions since that in which Herculaneum and Pompeii were overthrown, but the sides of the mountain have never been seriously disturbed.