The Brig–Zermatt railway line is a metre gauge railway line in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. Its -long line links the communities of Brig and Visp in the Rhone Valley with Täsch and the car free holiday resort of Zermatt in the Mattertal. The line also forms part of the much travelled and admired route of the Glacier Express between St. Moritz and Zermatt. The Gornergratbahn (which was opened in 1898) is connected with the line at Zermatt. The line was originally built by the Visp-Zermatt-Bahn (VZ), and opened between Visp and Zermatt in 1890–1891. The extension to Brig opened in 1930. The company was renamed the Brig-Visp-Zermatt-Bahn (BVZ) in 1961, and was later branded as BVZ Zermatt-Bahn. It merged with the Furka Oberalp Bahn (FO) in 2003 to form the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn (MGB). History Planning, construction and commencement of traffic The mountain village of Zermatt first gained major recognition in Europe in light of the inaugural ascent of the Matterhorn by Edward Whymper in 1865. From then onwards, the number of overnight visitors rose steadily, even though the village itself was only reachable by a lengthy march on foot through the barren valley of Zermatt. Even the simple mule ride as far as St. Niklaus took a long time. Nevertheless, by the 1880s there were already as many as 12,000 tourist visits to Zermatt each year. To promote tourism in the valley, and especially in Zermatt itself, plans soon emerged to build a railway line intended to connect the emerging spa with the Rhone Valley. On 21 September 1886, the Swiss Federal Council granted the banking house Masson, Chavannes & Co. in Lausanne and the Basler Handelsbank an initial concession. The original request was for a narrow gauge railway from Visp to Zermatt, using a mixture of adhesion and rack railway line. At the insistence of the Bundesrat, the gauge was finally altered to metre gauge. The railway was at the outset to be operated from the start of June to the end of September, as the promoters did not wish to take on the risks of operating the line in an alpine winter. Additionally, it was only in summer that there were prospects of significant numbers of passengers, as in those days winter tourism was still of no great importance. Nevertheless, the Bundesrat reserved the right to extend the operating season, and similarly stipulated that concessionary