In 1837 he found his way to
Paris, where he accepted employment. By taking technical courses in night school, he acquired considerable knowledge in
mathematics and
physics. With the opening of the Paris-St. Germain railroad line in 1839 he found his vocation to build locomotives. In June 1840 he moved to
Karlsruhe,
Germany, and found employment in the
machine works of
Emil Kessler. Here he soon rose to managing director and was involved in the construction of no less than 150 locomotives. One of these steam engines was the "
Limmat" of the
Schweizerischen Nordbahn (Swiss Northern Railway), opened on 9 August 1847, also called the Spanisch-Brötli line, which he ferried to Switzerland in order to test it on the
Zürich-Baden line. As construction of the
Basel-Olten line began in 1853, the board of directors of the
Schweizer Centralbahn Gesellschaft (
Swiss Central Rail Association) appointed him chief of the machine works. He made several official trips to
England and
Austria, and crawled under a fair number of
steam locomotives and into their boilers, "to make the good even better." Various improvements in railroading bear his name. In 1856 he became a master machinist and boss of the new main workshop of the
Centralbahn in Olten. Under his direction this workshop evolved into a full-fledged engine works, building the company's own locomotives and bridges. Track
grip (
adhesion) on the Hauenstein line caused him concern. The difficulties led Riggenbach to the concept of the
rack railway. After many attempts he discovered that one could negotiate
steeper stretches of
track by bolting a
rack between the
rails, which a toothed wheel or
cog on the underside of the locomotive could engage. He built his first locomotive in 1862, and on 12 August 1863 France awarded him
Patent No. 59625 for the invention. The
Vitznau-Rigi line was inaugurated in 1871 as the first
mountain railway to use the Riggenbach system in Europe. The locomotives were equipped with his
counter-pressure braking system. == Personal life ==