Schafbergbahn

Before there was a railway up the Schafberg, St. Wolfgang carried its visitors to the top.

Early in the nineteenth century the grandest families from Vienna and the leading citizens of St. Wolfgang had themselves carried up the mountain in chairs, and the town grew a trade to do it: the Sesselträger, the chair-carriers, a guild with fixed fares, fixed ranks to wait on and strict rules for the safety of the people they carried. There was somewhere to carry them to. The hotel on the summit was finished in 1864, three decades before the first train, and the operator calls it Austria's oldest mountain hotel. Since 1 August 1893 the climb has been the railway's.

It is, in the operator's words, the steepest rack railway in Austria: 5.85 kilometres from the shore of the Wolfgangsee to a summit station at 1,732 metres, climbing 1,190 metres on gradients of up to 26 per cent, in about 35 minutes. An Abt rack runs the whole length of the line, because the engines drive only through their cogwheels. Stern & Hafferl built it from April 1892 with 350 workers, most of them Italian, and some 6,000 mule loads carried the materials and the food up the mountain.

Three generations of engine work it today. Four diesel-electric locomotives, delivered between 2010 and 2020, haul most of the trains. Four oil-fired steam engines, built new at Winterthur in 1992 and 1995–96, run alongside them. And the original coal-fired engines of 1893 and 1894, which the operator counts among the oldest working rack steam locomotives in the world, come out only for a handful of summer evening trains.

The Schafbergbahn starts from its valley station on the lakeshore in St. Wolfgang, the ErlebnisQuartier, opened in April 2023 in place of the old one: a large, light-filled hall where the trains are boarded under cover, with a ticket office, a shop, a café and restaurant upstairs, and a small museum whose centrepiece is a historic locomotive. A train is a single engine and one or two coaches, and the engine is always at the downhill end, pushing.

The climb

The line is single track. About 472 metres out it crosses the Dittelbach, the stream that divides Upper Austria from the state of Salzburg, and the rest of the journey is in Salzburg. Through the forest the train passes the Aschinger loop, 65 metres long and added in 2011 so that trains could run every twenty minutes, and after 2.7 kilometres reaches the Dorneralm loop at 1,015 metres, where trains cross and the Wolfgangsee opens out below in full.

The rack is the Abt system, two toothed bars laid side by side between the rails, and because the engines have no drive to their wheels it is laid even where the line is nearly level. The gradient reaches 26 per cent. Until the track was renewed between 2018 and 2023, much of the line still ran on the rails laid in 1893, rolled at Zeltweg and stamped BST.

After about thirty minutes and 4.2 kilometres the train stops at Schafbergalm, 1,364 metres up. This is the treeline, and from here on the view opens over the valley and the Wolfgangsee. The last ten minutes are the most dramatic: the line runs close under rock walls and through two tunnels, 87 and 26 metres long, before reaching the summit station at 1,732 metres.

At the top

From the station a path climbs another 50 metres to the Hotel Schafbergspitze and the summit at 1,783 metres. To the north the mountain falls away sheer for about 300 metres, and at the Himmelspforte, a narrow gap in the rock, stands the summit cross. The operator counts eleven lakes from here on a clear day; the three big ones are the Wolfgangsee to the south, and the Mondsee and the Attersee below the north face.

The time of your train down is fixed when you buy the ticket. It can be changed at the summit station, the hotel or the Himmelspforte; trains down from Schafbergalm take passengers as space allows. The descent takes about forty minutes.

The engines

The first engine, the Z1, arrived at Ischl in pieces early in 1893 and was taken to St. Wolfgang by sledge, where Krauss assembled it. The first train reached the summit on 31 July and the line opened the next day. The original Krauss engines from Linz, of 1893 and 1894, burn coal and are kept for the nostalgia trains; because fewer and fewer firms have the knowledge, almost all their repairs are done in the railway's own workshop in St. Wolfgang. In 1992 and 1995–96 the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works at Winterthur built four new steam engines for the line, Z 11 to Z 14, fired with light oil. The diesel-electric locomotives from Stadler, Vz 31 to Vz 34, came in 2010, 2016 and 2020 and now do most of the work.

Who has owned it

A concession of 1890 covered both a narrow-gauge local railway from Ischl to Salzburg and a rack railway up the Schafberg from St. Wolfgang, and the Salzkammergut-Lokalbahn company was founded to build them. The rack railway was sold to the Österreichisches Verkehrsbüro in 1932, passed to the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1938 and to the Austrian Federal Railways after the war. Since the 2006 season it has belonged, with the Wolfgangsee boats, to a subsidiary of Salzburg AG.

The main season in 2026 runs daily from 25 April to 1 November, all the way to the summit. The timetable is built around a fixed core of trains, with more added as the crowds demand: on busy, fine days the operator runs trains every twenty minutes, and in bad weather or with few passengers some are cancelled.

Main season — 25 April to 1 November 2026

Up to the summit:

Down to St. Wolfgang:

● runs every day of the season. ◆ runs 27 June to 6 September on sunny days. ▲ runs for guests of the Hotel Schafbergspitze, booked in advance. Every other train runs as shown on the departure boards at the stations, so check the board on the day.

The last ordinary train down leaves the summit at 16:25. No reservation is needed for the journey up, but the time of the journey down is fixed when you buy the ticket, and can be changed at the terminals at the summit station, the hotel or the Himmelspforte. The operator publishes the day's live departures and free seats on its website.

Nostalgia steam evenings

On five Saturdays in summer 2026 — 27 June, 11 and 25 July, 8 and 22 August — an original 1893 engine leaves St. Wolfgang at 17:20, reaches the summit at 18:10, and comes down at 20:45, back at 21:35.

Out of season

In spring and in Advent trains run only as far as Schafbergalm. In 2026 the Advent trains run 20 November to 20 December, Wednesday to Sunday, and daily again from 26 December to 3 January. The spring trains of 2026 ran at weekends from 7 March to 12 April, and daily over Easter and from 18 to 24 April.

Getting to St. Wolfgang

St. Wolfgang is reached by bus or by boat. From Salzburg, the operator's route is bus 150 to Strobl and bus 546 to the Schafbergbahnhof stop, or bus 150 to St. Gilgen and the lake boat across. From Vienna or Linz, take the train to Attnang-Puchheim, a regional train to Bad Ischl on the Salzkammergut line, and bus 546 from there.

Times as of October 2026, from the SchafbergBahn's own 2026 timetable (opens in a new tab).

Tickets are sold in the operator's online shop, at its ticket offices in St. Wolfgang and St. Gilgen and on board the Wolfgangsee boats. There are no classes, and one price list covers the 2026 season. Children under four ride free if they sit on a lap; from four to fourteen they pay the child fare. On Fridays from 13:30, until 31 October, children ride free with an adult, and on Mondays from 13:30 there is a cheaper fare for anyone over sixty.

Dogs need a ticket, €7.50 for the day, and must be leashed and muzzled; prams and bicycles are not carried. Holders of the Salzkammergut Erlebnis-Card pay €58.20 return instead of €61, and a return ticket takes €4 off the parking at P7, beside the valley station. Read from the operator in October 2026.

No rail pass covers the Schafbergbahn. The operator states that neither the KlimaTicket, Austria's annual all-network ticket, nor the ÖBB Vorteilscard is valid on it, and it appears nowhere among the Austrian railway companies whose trains Interrail covers. Everyone pays the operator's fare.

A pass still gets you most of the way. ÖBB's trains to Salzburg, Attnang-Puchheim and Bad Ischl are covered by an Interrail Austria Pass or a Global Pass, and regional trains need no reservation. The last stretch to St. Wolfgang is a bus or a boat, and the rack railway is a separate ticket, so for this trip alone a pass is not worth buying; it pays only when the Salzkammergut is one stop on a longer journey through Austria. The Salzkammergut Erlebnis-Card takes a few euros off the fare.

Checked October 2026 against Interrail's table of railway companies (opens in a new tab) and the SchafbergBahn's prices page (opens in a new tab).

The Schafberg stands between three lakes, and a day here is as much about them as the mountain. These six are the town at the foot of the line, the summit itself, the cliff and the village across the Wolfgangsee, the Emperor's summer house at Bad Ischl, and the lake below the north face.

There are two places worth staying: down in St. Wolfgang, where the trains start and the lake boats call, or at the very top, in the hotel that was there before the railway.

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