Where Worlds Collide

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.

A talgo passenger train has collided head on with an intermodal freight in Spain. According to BBC News, the death toll has now risen to 19, and is expected to rise as some of the wrecked and burned carraiges haven’t yet been searched.

A head on collision on a single line track is just about the worst possible accident, with almost all the kinetic energy from the two trains going into disintegrating the trains themselves. With diesel haulage there’s a great risk of fire as fuel tanks rupture. Sadly this is what happened in the Spanish crash.

We’re lucky in Britain that such accidents are very rare, thanks to the fact that almost all main lines are double track. I can only remember one single line collision in the past thirty years, at Crowden in Sussex. Other head ons, such as the Ladbrooke Grove disaster have been conflicting movements across junctions.

On the subject of suburbs, this is what happens when you let a railfan design suburban housing estates. It’s from Tamworth, a suburb of Birmingham.

BBC NEWS | England | North Yorkshire | Museum talks ‘dirty’

Just when you thought things could not get any sillier…

A leading museum is talking dirty and using mobile text message slang to attract younger staff.

Posters showing a pair of oily handprints on a woman’s tight jeans have been put up in clubs and bars across York to try to tempt younger people to become volunteers at the National Railway Museum.

The poster uses the slogan “Get down and dirty” while another uses the text message “Ifu think trAns R ZzZz thnk x2″ (If you think trains are boring think again).

For those interesting in transport issues, Perverse Access Memory discusses commuting. It seems a dumb Republican politician is complaining that his 28 mile commute takes a whole 30 minutes! The horror! More and more roads must be built immediately! I bet he drives an SUV

BBC NEWS | UK | Terrorism fear derails train-spotters

First they came for the fox hunters.
But because I didn’t hunt foxes, I did nothing.

Then they came for the trainspotters

Who will be next?

Train-spotters are being told to leave stations as rail bosses tighten anti-terror security, BBC News Online can reveal.

To many people, train-spotters are a joke.

To Network Rail, the company which now runs the UK’s train network, they are potential terrorists.

One suspects this is an excuse. I suspect overzealous private security guards (and the dreaded British Transport Police) would rather harass a harmless and innocent group rather than, say, deal with drunken football supporters who might actually fight back.

Perhaps they think trainspotters are a “bad image”, having listened to too many third rate comedians that pick on train enthusiasts because they’re not allowed pick on racial minorities any more.

Or, as in the last paragraph, it’s the latest paranoia coming over from America.

But a meeting of US security officials in Washington in March reportedly classified “people sitting on train platforms who appear to be monitoring the timing of arrivals and departures” as suspicious behaviour.

Perhaps it’s time for rail enthusiasts to fight back? I’m thinking along the lines of the Kinder Scout mass trespass by ramblers a few decades back. What about a mass trainspot at one of the “Forbidden” stations?

Not that I’m advocating trespass on the actual tracks, of course. Just a large number of people descending onto the publically accessible parts of a big station, all holding the valid train tickets they used to get there. Perhaps some Network Rail accountant might like to add up the value of all those tickets?

There’s been some discussion of this on the DEModellers mailing list. One poster noted that regular Railfans could be a significant resource in combating terrorism and vandalism. Since almost all of us have cameras and most of us have mobile phones, we can report those trespassing on the tracks, vandalising stations, or acting suspiciously.

Update: I Like Adam Warr’s take on the issue.