(The record attempt was organized to celebrate 175 years of Swiss railways.)A railway nationFor a small country with a mountainous landscape which, at first glance, seems unsuited to railways, Switzerland punches well above its weight in the industry.
Necessity has long made it a pioneer in electrical, mechanical and civil engineering and its technology and expertise are exported all over the world.
Engineering feats such as the Gotthard Base Tunnel, opened in 2016, continue a long tradition of expanding the boundaries of the possible. With good reason, the Swiss are the world's most enthusiastic rail users, traveling an average of 2,450 kilometers every year by train - a quarter of their overall annual total. In common with other European countries, mobility has exploded in recent decades -- the average annual distance travelled by car and public transport has doubled in the last 50 years.
They traveled 19.7 billion passenger kilometers by rail in 2019, the last "normal" year before the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021 this fell to 12.5 billion passenger kilometers but as Switzerland celebrates 175 years since its first railway opened between Zürich and Baden, ridership is well on the way back to pre-pandemic levels.
So high are the expectations of public transport users in Switzerland that even a small delay is a source of quiet dissatisfaction. And not without good reason; many journeys in and around Switzerland's biggest cities are multi-modal, reliant on slick connections between trains, trams, buses and even boats at well-organized interchanges.
In 2021, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) operated 11,260 trains carrying 880,000 passengers and 185,000 tonnes of freight per day on a 3,265-kilometer-long network with 804 stations.
Adding the 70-plus "private" standard and narrow-gauge railways, many of which are also partly or fully in public ownership, takes that network to around 5,300 kilometers, the densest rail network in the world.
A heavily co-ordinated network integrates SBB's trains with numerous other operators, extensive narrow-gauge railways such as the Rhaetische Bahn (RhB), mountain cog railways, funiculars, post buses, cable cars, boats and more, providing dependable car-free access to every corner of the country (see
www.swiss-pass.ch).
Decades of long-term investment have created a core network of intensively used main lines linking all the country's major cities. Feeding into this are high-frequency S-Bahn (city rail) systems around the biggest cities plus regional and local railway lines, tramways and mountain railways, many of which provide a critical link to the outside world for rural and upland communities.
Despite massive investment over the last four decades, through long-term expansion programs such as "Bahn 2000." Switzerland's railways are becoming a victim of their own success. While SBB's overall punctuality still looks impressive to outsiders, there is concern about deteriorating performance, rising costs and its ability to fund essential maintenance and major projects after the devastating financial losses of 2020-21.
Disruption is still comparatively rare on the SBB network, but reliability has decreased in recent years as a result of congestion, staff shortages and poor punctuality of trains arriving from neighboring countries.