Hi guys, you are watching Railways Explained.
Today we start a new series of videos on our channel. The idea is to talk about different
railway systems of different countries around the world. This means we will present main
characteristics of certain railway systems, which will include some history, some discussion
about the market and network structure in that country, dominant rail companies present
on the market, main types of goods that are being transported, main corridors, traffic
performance and safety indicators, and many other cool and, for all rail lovers, interesting
stuff. If you find this concept interesting, please
tell us in the comments bellow, but also tell us which country would you like to see next.
And don t forget to claim the reasons for your proposal.
Anyway, the first coutry on our list is Switzerland. If you are wondering why Switzerland, reasons
are many. But, let s mention only few hints. Switzerland is among the top rail systems
in Europe in terms of intensity of traffic, but also network usage, service quality, punctuality
and passenger rail culture in general. In addition, it maintaines strong safety scores
all the time, highest technical standards and its railway network is 100% electrified.
Simply put, Switzerland s railways are among the best examples of how modern rail system
should look and also how it should be used by modern society. If we got your attention, let's proceed with the video. BRIEF HISTORY OF SWISS RAILWAYS Switzerland s railway system, like many others in Europe, went through three characteristic
stages of development. From the period of initial construction by private investors,
through the period of nationalization, all the way to the period of reform and modernization.
In a certain way, we already covered this topic in a video dedicated to the development
of European railways. If you didn t, check that one out. Now, back to Switzerland.
Just like in case of Europe and the rest of the world, the railway mania in Switzerland
began in the 19th century. Private investors were the ones who started construction of
many different railway lines, but, this will later prove to be problematic.
Again, just like in case of other countries, overconstruction took place, resulting in
oversized and incompatible network. This later led to the bankruptcy of many investors, which
finally motivated the Swiss Government to nationalize private railway companies.
However, Switzerland would not be Switzerland if this decision wasn t the subject of a referendum
held in 1898. Referendum took place on 20th February and on that occasion voters approved
the "Federal Act on Acquisition and Operation of Railways on Behalf of the Confederation
and on the Administrative Structure of the Swiss Federal Railways" (386,634 votes in
favor, 182,718 votes against). The debate which took place before the vote was also
very interesting. Under the slogan "Swiss Railways for the Swiss People", supporters
pointed out the advantages of standardization which certainly might take place if railways
come under the national control. Anyway, the process of nationalization was carried out
and completed on January 1st, 1902. So, this date can be considered the "official" birthday
of the Swiss Federal Railways. Or shortly - SBB.
In the following period, again, just like in case of the rest of the Europe, railways
were doing fine. Network was being developed, technology improved, lots of freight and passengers
ended up on trains, numbers went up. Then, something happened. In a few words - road
network improved, people started using cars, bussineses started using trucks, the economy
shifted from goods suitable for trains to goods suitable for trucks, and all was followed
by the stagnation of rail techology and accumulation of debts. Railways were in crisis. If you
watch Railways Explained on regular basis, you are already familiar with all these details.
When speaking of the rail reform in Switzerland, it was kind of different compared to the rest
of Europe. And that s why we are going to analyze it in a bit more detail. The reason
is the fact that the reform initiated in 1991 by the European Economic Community, the forerunner
of the European Union, was implemented in Switzerland which wasn t a member state of
the EU. However, in order to simplify, let s introduce three main characteristic reform
phases. The first phase of the reform of Swiss railways
began with a change in the rules governing the transport of passengers on the regional
level. The new Law on Railways which entered into force on 1st January 1996, among other,
significantly transformed relations between railway companies and public administration.
The ordering principle has been introduced, requiring public authorities to subsidise
only for the services agreed in advance and clearly indicated in the contract. Another
change relates to the powers delegated to the cantonal authorities. In the past, only
the Confederation set out the basic conditions for regional transport together with SBB,
and Confederation also covered all the costs alone. The idea was now different - to make
cantons fully responsible for the regional services on their territories.
The third, and most important novelty is related to the intention to end the SBB monopoly for
the regional passenger transport. This was undoubtedly the most innovative solution,
which was supposed to open up the way for competition.
The second phase of the reform is represented by introduction of a new regulatory framework.
The aim was to transpose the principles set out in EU legislation, in the first line Directive
91/440. This resulted in separation of the rail activities related to transport from
rail activities related to the infrastructure management. It also enabled the access to
the Swiss railway network for all interested authorized railway companies. It also significantly
changed the organization and business model of SBB. One of the main goals of this part
of railway reform was in fact to abolish the power of federal administration over the SBB.
Firthermore, during 2005, the Swiss government proposed a new package of laws branded as
"Railway Reform 2". The main goal was to complete the transposition of the first and transpose
the second package of the EU railway laws. However, the Swiss parliament returned this
package to Government with the request not to implement it all at once, but rather through
several smaller packages. But, that s not that important. What is important is that
the principle of competition has been formaly accepted, for both international freight and
passenger rail traffic. But, in the case of domestic traffic, the "Swiss model" actually
differs from the standards dictated by the European Commission.
The Swiss model has its own specificities and is more akin to a particular type of governance
than to a true change in the market structure. The Swiss rail system is vertically integrated,
like in case of, for example, Japan. Precisely, this fact, that Switzerland has a single rail
system, is often seen as an essential reason behind its exceptional performance. The Swiss
railway system is in that sense a "hybrid" system, somewhere between liberalized market,
partly in line with the EU law and philosophy, and, on the other hand, stiff national and
monolopolistic railway system. However, indisputably, in the case of Switzerland, this EU philosophy
and the management model gave incredible results in terms of traffic performance, which will
be discussed in more detail, in the next chapter. RAILWAY COMPANIES IN SWITZERLAND The liberalization of the rail market in Switzerland
enabled specific form of on rail competition and the emergence of large number of private
companies, involved primarily in the transport of goods. According to the latest report of
the Independent Regulators' Group - Rail, there are in total 59 companies on the Switzerland
s railway market. Of course, we ll not gonna talk about all
59, but we ll mention only the few most significant. We will start from the largest - SBB Group.
SBB group is organized according to the parent company structure. SBB manages four operating
Divisions, as well as the Freight Section. These are Passenger Services Markets, Passenger
Services Production, Real Estate and Infrastructure Division.
The former Cargo division became an independent group company at the start of 2019 and emerged
as Freight Section with controlled subsidiaries SBB Cargo and SBB Cargo International. SBB
Cargo operates mostly in Switzerland and SBB Cargo International owns two companies: SBB
Cargo Germany as its German production company, and SBB Cargo Italy as its Italian production
company. SBB s governing bodies are responsible for
the overall management and supervision, in particular for the strategic and financial
management, however, they respect the legal independence of the group companies and all
applicable legal, statutory and regulatory provisions.
The S dostbahn or SOB is a small railway company, jointly owned by the cantonal and federal
governments. This company operates on 147 km (91.3 mi) of railway lines, out of which
129 km (80 mi) are in their ownership. The Voralpen Express service (Pre-Alpine Express)
operated by SOB runs every hour as an InterRegio express train from Lucerne to St. Gallen.
The French-Swiss joint-venture TGV Lyria founded in May 1993 operates high-speed trains between
Paris and South-France with services to Geneva, Lausanne, Basel and Zurich in Switzerland.
It is 74% in the ownership of the French National Railways (SNCF) and 26% in the ownership of
SBB. The German national railway company Deutsche
Bahn (DB) owns cross-border lines from the German border to Basel Badischer Bahnhof station,
which is also operated by DB. It also owns and operates an east west line across the
canton of Schaffhausen that forms a link in the largely German High Rhine Railway, and
jointly owns Schaffhausen railway station with SBB. DB also operates long-distance trains
from Germany to some Swiss cities, including ICE services to Basel, Zurich, Berne, Chur
and Interlaken. On the other hand, Swiss operators run several services to Germany, for example
regular EuroCity service to Stuttgart. The Austrian Railjet by BB is also in the
game, operating the service between Zurich and several destinations in Austria. The??
services run via Buchs, St. Gallen and enable connections with the cities of Innsbruck,
Salzburg and Vienna among others. If you agree, now is the right time to bring
in some numbers. FACTS AND FIGURES For the purpose of this section, as a source
of the figures, we used statistical data reports from SBB website.
With that being said, the length of the railway lines managed by SBB is 3260 km (2025 mi),
out of which 1893 km (1176 mi) stands for the multi-track lines. The longest tunnel
in Switzerland is the Gotthard Base Tunnel with a lenght of 57,1 km (35 mi). This tunnel
is at the same time the world's longest railway and deepest traffic tunnel. We mentioned this
tunnel in our first video where we talked about the Guinness World Records related to
railways. The Degree of electrification of railway lines
in Switzerland is amazing 100%, which is unique in the world. In addition, Switzerland posess
the densest railway network in the world, where the line length per country area of
100km2 is 120.75 km, as you can see on the screen.
Besides that, the SBB railway network is 100% covered with the European Train Control System
which enables a high level of safety and reliability of the service.
In terms of employes, in 2020 the SBB group had a total of 33,498 workers. This may seem
as a large number, but keep in mind that the largest number of employees are engaged in
passenger transport, a total of 14,680, and the passenger transport in Switzerland is...
intense. We ll talk about that in a moment. However, this number is followed by 9,978
people involved in the management and maintenance of railway infrastructure, as well as the
traffic regulation, while a total of 3,225 deal with freight transport services. The
rest of employees work in Real Estate and group-level units.
Let s now talk about the SBB s transportation performance. Here we will present the data
for 2019, having in mind that the Covid pandemic in 2020, like everywhere else, left a significant
mark on rail transport. So, the number of trains on the Swiss railway
network per day in 2019 was 11,294. Yes, you heard right. Over 11 thousand trains per day,
in a country whose railway network is only 3260 km long. Within this number, 9,522 trains
are passenger services, while 1,772 stands for freight operations.
The number of passengers per day is 1.32 million, which means that SBB transports about 488
million passengers a year. Just to remind you, Switzerland has a population of about
8.5 million people. Also, SBB has one great animation on its website relating to the passenger
services, that we can t say anything about except for enjoy . This is really fascinating.
The busiest station in Switzerland is Zurich with over 400 thousand passengers a day. Next
one is Bern with over 200 thousand. What is also amazing in the story of the Swiss
railways is the punctuality of the passenger trains. In Switzerland a train service is
considered on time if the train arrives at any station on its route with less than three
minutes delay. Do you know what is the percentage of on time services in Switzerland? Over 91%.
Regarding the freight perfomance, 200 thousand tonnes per day is being transported by SBB
cargo and SBB Cargo International on the Swiss railway network. Other private companies also
transport significant amounts of goods, but we did not manage to find any reliable data
on the amounts. However if some of you already know, please let us know in the comments.
We planned to talk about the rolling stock as well, however, we had to give up on that
idea having in mind that the video would in that case last too long. Instead, we encourage
you to take a look on this beautuful list available on the SBB website. Link will be
in the description. Also, let s now mention one interesting news
item that we came across recently. Namely, in April this year, SBB ordered 60 double-decker
trains from Stadler, worth about 1.18 billion euros, aiming to expand its train capacity
and offer more regional services, starting from 2024.
And now, one more interesting part - finances. As you can see on the screen, in the last
10 years SBB has had a positive consolidated result where operating income was higher than
operating expenses. But unfortunately, the Covid pandemic caused the change in this trend.
As you can see, all types of revenues declined in 2020 and all expenditures increased, which
led to SBB losing 617 million Swiss francs. We really hope things will improve in the
next period for the SBB, and that SBB, as well as other European and world railways
will be back on the tracks in terms of finances. In any case, we hope we gave you enough information
to understand the Swiss railway system. Indeed, it can really be a good benchmark for all
other railways in the world. This was all for today, we hope you enjoyed
and learned something new about the railways of the world. Don t forget to like this video,
share it with your rail-loving friends, and of course, subscribe to our channel. Until
the next time, goodbye!
They are some mistakes. An exhaustive list:
Taking just SBB isn't a good methodology. The length of the rail network is 5196 km according to the federal office for statistics.
Yes. Source: I live in Switzerland