Returning to Switzerland for the first time since the pandemic, I realised that I’d forgotten how reliable the train system is there.
The planned return journey from Zermatt to Zurich airport required 3 trains (Zermatt to Visp, Visp to Berne, Berne to Zurich airport), all with tight connections (the change at Berne was only 8 minutes from different platforms).
My instinct was to search for earlier options, to build in contingency, but one of my friends who lives there said very firmly, “There’s no need to Peter, this is Switzerland!”
And he was right, they all ran on time.
I was reminded of our BlueSky event in Tokyo in 2018, when, amongst other things, we studied the Japanese rail system.
The latest statistics show that there were 18.81 billion passenger journeys in Japan in 2021 and the average delay of the famous “bullet” Shinkansen trains was just 0.9 minutes (and this was a major fail on the 0.5 minutes of the previous year).
In the Railway Country Rankings, Japan comes first, Switzerland third (91.9% of trains run on time) and the UK is 29th (74.3%).
I appreciate that our network is old – but then Switzerland and Japan are hardly emerging economies. Also, may I suggest that from a geographical perspective, the topography of Japan and Switzerland are both more challenging than at home, and their weather extremes are greater than ours too?
Which begs asking, for no doubt the umpteenth time, why is our rail service so poor?
Based only on personal experiences, and a chance conversation with a senior train company manager, (we were on a delayed train together), it comes down to one thing.
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