Between 2017 and 2019, the Swiss Federal Railways, SBB, managed an average of 97% of trains calling at their stations within 3 minutes of the advertised time. When compared to other European rail operators using a similar method of calculation, Swiss trains come out at the top for punctuality. However, this figure does not take into account the effect that cancelled trains and missed connections have on a passenger’s journey.
I was once on a trip from Geneva to Weinfelden scheduled to last just 3:30h with just one change in Zürich. However, my first train was cancelled by Lausanne, forcing me to take a detour via Yverdon-les-Bains to get to Zürich for my connection so I could still make it on time. When I got to Zürich, I found out that my onward express connection was cancelled, which led to a 58-minute delay by taking the slower regional train that calls at every stop. On paper, all the trains arrived on time as they called to all their scheduled stops within 3 minutes of the advertised time, especially when cancelled trains are excluded from the method of measurement.
Every Sunday, I would travel from Geneva to Zürich for church departing on the direct express connection at 7:15am and arriving in Zürich at 9:56am. I would then connect on the bus that leaves from the main door of the station at 9:57am to arrive at church at 10:09am. With a distance of over 280km, the train typically arrives at Zürich 30 to 60 seconds late. On paper, this is an on-time train, but it means that I would miss my bus, forcing me to take one 15 minutes later and arriving at my destination at 10:24am instead of 10:09am. This is an example of how things can go wrong when connections are designed to be so seamless that waiting time is minimal.
The SBB is painfully aware of these problems so they have added a method of calculation called “customer punctuality” to indicate the punctuality with which passengers reach their intended destination instead of just counting which individual legs of the journey are late. When missed connections and cancelled trains are taken into account, the punctuality rate decreases to just 89.7% over the three-year period between 2017-2019.
Still, despite the decrease in punctuality after realistic factors are accounted for, a near-90% punctuality rate is pretty good, right? It’s all fine and dandy if you only use the train once a fortnight to visit grandma on Saturday and you’re in that 89.7% group that experiences Swiss punctuality. But what if you’re in the 10.3% group that does experience delays, how bad are they? Under Swiss statistics, a delay of 4 minutes and 40 minutes are both technically delays, but the impact on passengers is very different.
At the turn of the century, the SBB adopted an hourly schedule where trains would call at major stations just before the hour or half-hour and depart just after it so schedules were like a pulsing heartbeat. Connections are typically less than 15 minutes from each other, so when a train is late there is really no buffer for the delay and passengers have to wait a whole hour for the next connection.
Another question to explore is to find out what kinds of trains are late. While the delay of local trains might not cause systemic failures for the rest of the day due to the frequency of connections and limited distances they travel, a delay of an intercity train could have serious knock-on effects to the whole system. To individual travelers, it might not be so bad to miss a local train that comes every 15 minutes to get to the grocery store on a Friday afternoon, it can be disruptive to miss an hourly connection to the nearest international airport. According to customer punctuality numbers in 2019, 92.2% of the S-Bahn and 89.8% of the Regioexpress trains arrived on time, whereas just 86.4% of the Intercity and 70.9% of the International connections arrived on time.
As someone who makes an average of 31 trips a month on the SBB with an average monthly distance of over 5,300km and trip distance of 174km, the chronic delays that plague intercity rail travel has had an immense adverse impact on my timetable. I experience delays of over 3 minutes on a weekly basis, but more often than not, these delays can last up to an hour for a missed connection. Add that to the fact that even the fastest Swiss trains average just 100km/h, way slower than the fastest trains in neighboring France, Germany, or Italy, and you’ll start to realize that Switzerland doesn’t have a railway network – it has a giant metro system.
