Abt, Roman

SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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b. 17 July 1850 Bünzen, Switzerland

d. 1 May 1933 Lucerne, Switzerland

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Swiss locomotive engineer, inventor of the Abt rack rail system.

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Abt trained under N. Riggenbach and worked for his short-lived International Company for Mountain Railways during the 1870s, and subsequently invented the Abt rack system as an improvement on Riggenbach's ladder rack, in which the rungs gave trouble by working loose. Abt's rack system, in what became its usual form, comprises two machined racks side by side with their teeth staggered so that a tooth in one rack is opposite a recess in the other, and at least one tooth is always engaged with a locomotive's driving pinions. This system was first used in 1884 on the mixed rack-and-adhesion Harz Railway in Germany, and then largely superseded Riggenbach's system for new rack railways built worldwide to an eventual total of seventy-two, including the Snowdon Mountain Railway in the UK that was built in the 1890s. In many cases Abt himself designed locomotives and rolling stock, and supervised their construction.

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Bibliography

1877–8, Abstract in Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Vol. 52 (part II) (abstract of a paper given by Abt in which he described eight Riggenbach system railways then operating; his own system was patented in 1882).

Further Reading

J.Marshall, 1978, A Biographical Dictionary of Railway Engineers, Newton Abbot: David \& Charles.

O.J.Morris, 1951, Snowdon Mountain Railway, Ian Allan.

PJGR