Steam billows from a tiny rack-and-pinion locomotive as it curves into the Brünig Pass station in the Swiss Alps — one of the most dramatic mountain railway stops in all of Europe, perched at 1,008 metres amid dense fir forests with snow-capped peaks looming beyond. The hand-coloured photographic image, vivid with warm ochres and alpine blues, shows the station building with its restaurant clearly visible, passengers in Edwardian dress milling on the platform, and two trains occupying the passing loop — a rare operational snapshot of the Brünig line in its early steam years. The Brünig Railway (opened 1888, extended to Interlaken 1916) was Switzerland's only metre-gauge mountain railway operated by the federal railways and used an Abt rack system on its steepest sections. Published by Chr. Brennenstuhl of Meiringen — the same Meiringen famous as the village near the Reichenbach Falls where Arthur Conan Doyle "killed" Sherlock Holmes in 1893, just years before this card was printed. The undivided back confirms a pre-1905 date.