Steam locomotive of the first mountain railway, the Mont Cenis Pass Railway. Due to increasing traffic delaying the mails and commercial interests, it was decided to build the Fr矇jus Rail tunnel through the Alps connecting France and Italy. As its building, started in 1857, would take 25 years, the British engineer John Barraclough Fell (1815 ??1902) proposed building a narrow gauge passenger railway based on his system over the mountains while the tunnel was being bored. The Fell system incorporates a central third-rail for a rail track too steep to be worked by adhesion alone. The locomotive is fitted with four horizontal wheels, two set on each side of the central rail. The railway ran successfully from 1857 until 1871, when the Fr矇jus Tunnel was completed 11 years early. A full rail service from Calais to Brindisi took 30 hours off the journey time from Britain to India.