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Millions of
people in Switzerland show every year what
good brains they have, but how many think of
trains as anything more than a convenient
and stressfree way to get from A to B,
speeding past traffic jams, admiring the
countryside, reading the newspaper, getting
on with paperwork...?
Railways: Powering Swiss economic growth
And yet the railways mean so much more. In
the course of the last 150 years they have
helped make Switzerland what it is today.
It boosted the 19th century economy.
Industrialists could import and export as
never before. Because Switzerland lacks raw
materials, they concentrated on the
specialised, high-quality products typical
of Swiss industry even today. Tourists came
flocking to enjoy the mountains. Speedy
transport meant that not only the wealthy
leisured classes could visit, but also the
far more numerous middle-classes who had
limited holiday time and could not afford to
spend weeks on the way. As trains brought
cheap cereal from abroad, farmers switched
to dairy agriculture - more profitable and
less labour intensive.
It changed the way Swiss people lived and
where they lived. They became more mobile.
In the first 50 years of the railways, the
number of journeys taken went up 100-fold.
Redundant farm workers abandoned the
countryside and flocked to the cities to
become the workforce for the new industries.
It altered the landscape, and not only with
the construction of tracks, bridges and
tunnels, or the change in agricultural land
use. The hillsides changed too: trees were
at last replanted after decades of
unrestricted felling, once it became clear
that landslides and flooding from the bare
hills were destroying railway tracks.
The impact of the railways is not only
historical. They are shaping the Switzerland
of tomorrow as well. This is reflected in
the ambitious Rail 2000 programme of the
Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). Its launch
back in December 2004 signalled the start of
a new chapter in the history of the SBB.
Customers now enjoy more frequent and faster
services, as well as better connections
across the SBB network thanks to a
sophisticated synchronised timetable (trains
every half hour on the busiest lines) and
new rail infrastructure. For example, it now
takes less than one hour to travel between
three of Switzerland’s major cities - Basle,
Berne and Zurich.
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