Comment by Tade0
1 year ago
It's a classic case of efficiency vs latency.
Swiss railways optimise for punctuality, sacrificing line capacity (compensated for with double-decker cars).
Meanwhile every other European rail transport authority seems to be bent on squeezing out the most of the lines it has.
I grew up in a city that had two parallel rail lines in the east-west axis - one for long-distance connections, cargo and everything else, the other a refurbished old main line with trains only once per hour.
The latter was punctual almost to the minute(even if comparatively slow at an average 30km/h including stops), while the former was a mess and you were often better off driving instead.
My friend living in the suburbs close to that refurbished line always boasted how it took him a grand total of 18 minutes to get to the city centre and he could rely on the train to always arrive. That was quicker than I could get there by any means, despite a similar distance.
What you said goes against what the other commenter have said, that is Swiss trains cannot inject late trains into the system because the tracks are used at capacity, I.e. there is no buffer for trains to “queue”. Every train is always at the expected place, at the expected time. Hence the system is always at maximum throughput and on-time.
> SBB grants Eurocity trains on the Munich-Zurich route a buffer of ten minutes before reallocating their train path, and even 15 minutes for ICE trains between Freiburg and Basel.
Emphasis mine. This whole system works because they account for delays by having a time buffer in each route that can be consumed by going slower.
During my commutes along Lake Zurich I noticed that the trains would rarely arrive earlier than 30s before schedule - even if it meant going below the maximum allowed speed, as evidenced by instances where the train used the same section to restore the buffer by going faster.