Switzerland

I realise I haven't blogged about my holiday in Switzerland. There will be more when I get my photos back, but in the meantime, some observations about the Swiss transport system.

The trains really do run on time. The whole thing runs like clockwork, and you can actually rely on connections, more than can be said for British trains. In the whole week, only saw a single delay, of ten minutes, and that was the EC "Lötchberg" that had started from Wiesbaden in Germany. Compare that with a glance at the departure board at Stockport the weekend after returning home, with half the trains between thirty and sixty minutes late!

The basic timetable right across the country revolves around hourly services, with express services and local trains making the same connections every hour. For example, Spiez, where I stayed, was the junction of four routes. Every hour four inter-city trains from Basel, Zurich, Brig and Interlaken converged on the station, preceded by local trains from Reichenbach, Interlaken and Zwiesimmen connecting into them. After everything had connected with everything else, the seven trains would depart. For the next hour there would be nothing, then the cycle would repeat an hour later. There were some extra trains on the half hour, such as the odd international train to or from Italy, and some peak hour commuter trains from Bern.

The network of interlocking connections isn't always perfect. One some routes, such as the Kandertal bus link or the narrow gauge Montreux Oberland Bernois line, the basic interval is two-hourly, not hourly, and you can get stuck with a long wait if you pick the 'wrong' hour. This happened to me at Montebovon, junction with the MOB and another metre gauge line, the Gruyere Fribourg Morat, where I had a 50 minute wait. Fortunately the pub was open!

Another thing that struck me was the volume of local freight. Many small stations had local freight depots, and just about every lineside industry has a private siding. I even saw a petrol station in Interlaken West, served by it's own private siding with a rail tanker being unloaded. Imagine that in Britain! One day I spent a few hours away from the scenic delights of the alps at the busy traffic centre of Olten, nexus of the lines from Bern/Lötchberg, Luzern/Gotthard, Basel, Zurich and Neuchatel/Geneve, where, as well as a very intensive passenger service, there was on average a freight every ten minutes, mostly wagonload traffic.

Then there was the age of a lot of the equipment. The Swiss build trains to last, and look after them. If a locomotive doesn't last at least 50 years, they don't consider they've got their money's worth out of them. With the exception of one victim of collision damage, the entire fleet of Ae6/6s, dating from 1952, are still in traffic. Three of the venerable Ae4/4 of the BLS, dating from the 1940s, were hard at work on the Simmental line. On an earlier visit ten years ago, there was still a lot of prewar stuff about, such as the numerous rigid-framed Ae4/7 2-Do-1s dating from 1927, and the BLS's Ae6/8 1-Co-Co-1s from 1939.