with half-timbered Country-Biedermeier houses which reflected the growing prosperity of the town. The village church was rebuilt on the old foundations, but with a higher tower and a new onion dome. An attempt to build a railway from Bern through Huttwil and the lower Emmental to Lucerne in 1871 failed. It took almost two decades before Huttwil was eventually connected to a railway. The Langenthal–Huttwil railway opened in 1889, followed by the Huttwil–Wolhusen railway in 1895, the Ramsei-Sumiswald line in 1908 and the Eriswil line in 1915. The railway connected Huttwil to the rest of the country and allowed industry to grow in the town. The first three railways eventually merged into the United Huttwil Railway (Vereinigten Huttwil-Bahnen) which in 1997 became the Regionalverkehr Mittelland AG. Due to Huttwil being a regional center a secondary school opened in the town in 1873. A district hospital opened a few years later, in 1903. The original hospital was replaced with a new building in 1929 and the old hospital became a retirement home. In 1939 a Roman Catholic church was built in Huttwil for the Catholic residents of the village. The Brother Klaus Church was rebuilt to its current appearance in 1983. Geography Huttwil has an area of . As of the 2006 survey, a total of or 64.6% is used for agricultural purposes, while or 22.0% is forested. Of rest of the municipality or 13.6% is settled (buildings or roads), or 0.1% is either rivers or lakes. From the same survey, industrial buildings made up 1.7% of the total area while housing and buildings made up 6.4% and transportation infrastructure made up 4.6%. A total of 19.9% of the total land area is heavily forested and 2.1% is covered with orchards or small clusters of trees. Of the agricultural land, 29.9% is used for growing crops and 32.0% is pasturage, while 2.6% is used for orchards or vine crops. All the water in the municipality is flowing water. It is situated in the lower Emmental on the border with the Canton of Lucerne between Eriswil, Wyssachen, Dürrenroth and Walterswil. The main town is near the confluence of the Langeten, Rotbach and Wyssachen rivers. It consists of the town of Huttwil and a number of surrounding hamlets. On 31 December 2009 Amtsbezirk Trachselwald, the municipality's former district, was dissolved. On the following day, 1 January 2010, it joined the newly created Verwaltungskreis