For more than a century, ABB has been solving infrastructure challenges in Davos
ABB and the city of Davos have a long and rich history of working closely together.
Today, Davos is best known around the world as the home of the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of world leaders that adopted its current name in 1987. That happens to be the same year that the merger of the Swedish industrial company ASEA with the Swiss engineering innovator Brown Boveri & Cie. was announced. But Brown Boveri’s activities in Davos stretch much further back – to the town’s emergence as a resort destination in the late 1800s.
Among Brown Boveri’s first Davos projects was the power station, which still produces electricity for the town from two hydroelectric turbines. In the 1890s, Brown Boveri equipped the station with a generator and a transformer, among other equipment.
Davos power station (1899) 
Generator at Davos Power Station (1899)
Getting to Davos became half the fun of visiting the city, thanks to the ingenious transport systems that Brown Boveri helped develop for conveying people and goods up, down and through the Swiss Alps.
Among Brown Boveri’s early e-mobility projects in Davos was the Davos-Platz-Schatzalp railway line in 1924. Still in use today, the line is a funicular. Motors use cables to pull tramcars up a steep grade, the ascending car counterbalanced by a descending car.
Electrified funiculars of this sort opened up new mountain routes to travelers from across Europe. Railway planners in other parts of the world, including Japan, quickly adopted the company’s technology for transport through mountainous regions.
Today, Switzerland is home to the world’s steepest funicular railway, the Stoosbahn, with a gradient of up to 110 percent, between the town of Schwyz and the Alpine village of Stoos. The line opened for service in late 2017, and like its predecessor in Davos, incorporates technology from the company now known as ABB.
Brown Boveri was also a pioneer in the use of electricity to power funicular railways. That choice was made partly because Switzerland’s mountain lakes provided an abundant source of hydropower. But electric motors also offer the advantage of lower energy consumption than combustion engines. And they provide better reliability, because the automatic brakes and the motor can be interlocked. The early systems developed by Brown Boveri helped establish electricity as the preferred form of power for modern passenger railroads.
After the Second World War, the Davos region quickly re-established itself as a travel destination. By 1956, more than 400,000 passengers a year were traveling on the funicular line linking Davos and the Parsenn ski area – prompting management to increase the railway’s capacity by 35 percent.
The commutator motors that Brown Boveri first installed in funicular railways in the 1930s were adapted for use in chairlifts and ski hoists in the early 1960s. One early example was the Clavadeleralp ski lift near Davos, which still employs ABB technology.
Among Brown Boveri’s other activities in the Davos area was its role as a supplier of snout-nosed “Crocodile” locomotives and other equipment to the Rhaetian Railway, the mountain rail system built beginning in the late 1880s. Davos has always been a key stop on the Rhaetian, whose narrow-gauge tracks, many tunnels and mountain vistas have made it a world-renowned tourist attraction. In 1973, 10 of Brown Boveri’s most advanced locomotives for narrow-gauge tracks went into service on the Rhaetian Railway. For many years they served the Coire-Landquart-Davos and Coire-Filisur-Albula routes, passing through the tunnel to St. Moritz.
In 2016, ABB provided its technology for Switzerland’s first chairlift suitable for children and the physically disabled, located at the popular Klosters-Madrisa mountain resort near Davos.
Today, ABB no longer assembles entire locomotives, preferring to focus on the sophisticated electronic components that go into them. But ABB’s electric traction motors and motor drives are integral to the Allegra trains that now traverse the Rhaetian Railway. In fact, almost anyone who has traveled recently to Davos by rail probably rolled into town on an ABB-powered Allegra.
