The Swiss government has earmarked 16 billion francs for rail repairs in Switzerland. Avoiding the Deutsche Bahn train chaos witnessed in neighbouring Germany has been named as one of the main motivations.

Swiss government will invest 16 million francs in rail network

The Swiss National Council has approved a plan to spend 16,4 billion francs on maintaining the railway network between 2025 and 2028, 2 billion more than it had originally planned. Half of the money will go to Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), while the rest will be distributed among regional public transport providers. 

According to figures from SBB and the government itself, Switzerland’s rail network has failed to keep up with maintenance in the past years. The latest Network Status Report from the Federal Office for Transport (FOT) shows that public transport providers have ramped up the number of rail services offered, without keeping up with maintenance.

A higher frequency of services means that 230 kilometres of track, switches and other crucial infrastructure will have to be renewed every year to avoid delays and reliability issues. Due to budget constraints, SBB was only able to repair 184 kilometres of track in 2023.

SBB admitted that its own systems are “increasingly outdated” and that more needs to be invested so that it can "continue to operate with the same level of safety, availability and reliability." 

Swiss fear they could “face conditions like Germany”

Faced with this underinvestment, rail infrastructure manager Peter Kummer warned that Swiss railways face “conditions like in other countries”, specifically Germany. 

Swiss Transport Minister Albert Rösti (SVP) wrote back in May that "we see in our neighbouring country what happens when too little is invested in maintaining the infrastructure over decades." When debating the new funding package, lawmakers repeatedly raised fears that Swiss passengers will face “conditions like those in Germany.”

The spectre of Deutsche Bahn is often used as both a cautionary tale and boogeyman when debating the health of the Swiss railways. Every third Deutsche Bahn passenger was delayed in 2022 and a third of German long-distance trains were delayed in 2023.

Much of the crisis at Deutsche Bahn has its source in decades of underinvestment and haphazard maintenance, with the company having to change its timetable between 2 and 3 million times this year due to signal failures, broken switches and safety-imposed speed limits. DB Netz AG head Philipp Nagl told reporters in August that a decade of renewal was required to get German railways back on track.

Volker Wissing gives Deutsche Bahn a deadline

In early September, German Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing publicly pushed Deutsche Bahn to improve punctuality, particularly on long-distance trains, while making administrative and management cuts to save money and make public transport more profitable.

Wissing said Deutsche Bahn bosses had until 2027 to develop a services and finance improvement plan, demanding quarterly improvement updates be issued to the Federal Ministry for Transport in the meantime.

Shortly after Wissing’s push, Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard Lutz announced that the rail company had put together a 110-page plan to improve service punctuality. Lutz said the plan includes introducing more commuter connections, redesigning the regional network, using more ICE trains, reducing turnaround times and expanding international services.

This article originally appeared on IamExpat in Switzerland.

Thumb image credit: sculpies / Shutterstock.com