Switzerland begins tests on the longest train tunnel in the world | Hacker News Reader

Switzerland begins tests on the longest train tunnel in the world

railwaygazette.com

129 pointsbontoJR123 comments

I wish the US had the transportation culture of Switzerland, in reference to a nice forward infrastructure.

All we have here are old diesel trains, crappy busses, and corrupt politicians and companies that tell us we can't have any better. And to add insult to injury, they keep raising fairs and increasing delays and down time.

In order to get shiny new trains and big public infrastructure projects like this, you need to pay a lot of tax, and this model does not go down well with the American electorate, generally speaking.

True. But it is a fallacy to believe US taxes were low. They aren't. Especially in NY and CA.

Agreed, being able to levy fees on probably the largest bank accounts in the world, and not having to pay upkeep on a nuclear arsenal probably helps too.

U.S. total taxation as percentage of GDP is the lowest of any of its peers in the West. Only a few developed countries are lower (HK, Singapore).

Only because the rich don't pay taxes in the US.

As a middle-class American who lived and worked for a decade in Switzerland (and I made more money there), I can confirm that I always paid less as a percentage in Switzerland.

Switzerland has a 8% VAT.

That's lower than a number of US cities.

and only 2.5% on essentials like food

To the contrary. The top 10% in Switzerland make 23% of the income but pay 21% of the taxes. In the U.S. the top 10% makes 33% of the income but pays 45% of the taxes. See: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-nation-has-most-....

That doesn't say that the top 10 accounts for 45% but that it should account for 45%. That's a big difference.

The problem is that the US tax system is so complex that once you reach a certain level of wealth, it pays for you to have someone find those loopholes. Warren Buffet famously decried that he pays lower taxes than his secretary, for example: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta...

Swiss roads have no potholes, there are no homeless, they have universal healthcare and a free university system. I've lived there and I paid less in taxes, and one big difference is that the wealthy pony up their fair share.

- there are some homeless, but usually import from rest of europe that comes in spring and leaves in autumn, some beggars here and there. - universal PAID healthcare (except dental and eye care, that is extremely expensive and out of your pocket) - free university - only state ones, private are costly. - roads are better than elsewhere and drivers are actually nice :)

wealthy pay, superwealthy just a bit due to special tax deals (which still benefits the country compared to them leaving for say Monaco or gazillion of other tax havens all around the globe).

Swiss taxation is very similar to US (only country in Europe that has a Sales tax, private health care etc). The main difference is military budget.

Every E.U. country has a sales tax. And way higher than the US one. It's called VAT...

US Sales tax is NOT European VAT tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax#Examples

That's not what I said. I said the EU has sales tax. On everything, even work hours, if you're a freelancer and sell your time. They call it VAT. They could even call it a whistle for all I care, but it still is a tax on sales.

No, it's a tax on value addition. Hence the name...

What value do you add to a lettuce or a cabbage?

The full value, since you bring it into existence as a farmer.

If you buy cabbages from a farmer and make cabbage soup, you are taxed on the value addition that soup making results in.

What about if you buy the soup and only put $1 more on it's price and sell it? What value did you add? Your profit, the one where you are already taxed? You still have to add VAT... Call it VAT or sales tax, it's a tax on the poor and should be killed with fire.

VAT is not charged every thing some items are zero rated kids clothing for example.

Im a dual US and Swiss Citizen. My taxes are lower in Switzerland. Of course I still have to pay the difference back to the US, but that's not the point. Switzerland has such a great infrastructure because they have been making steady, incremental investments over a long time. They accept that a project can have a very long payback period. Also, they invest to keep their infrastructure very well maintained, which keeps utility high and makes major overhauls less frequent, thus extending the duration that they benefit from their original big investment.

So I think you don't need high taxes, but rather a long term outlook and the will to execute it, across multiple election cycles. Boston's Big Dig is the most recent example of such a project from the US that I can think of.

I'm pretty sure though that Switzerland spends - relatively speaking - much more on public transportation than the US (if I looked it up correctly it's about 8.7% for CH and 1.2% for the US on the federal budget). After all the terrain is more demanding (alps, etc.) and the density of the network is much higher.

Maybe it's because spends a huge amount on military instead?

US Taxes as a % of GDP: 26.9

Switzerland: 29.4 (or about 9% higher)

I obviously cannot comment on your particular tax situation but it is not representative of the country as a whole.

The average Swiss citizen will earn more than your average american - overall swiss citizens will pay a smaller % on taxes than americans.

Um, no. 29.4 is > 26.9 no matter what the average earnings are.

Let me try to explain with a very very simple example why the average person might pay less, even though the average tax might be higher.

Person 1-10 make $10. Person 11 makes $100

Case 1, a flat tax of 30%

Person 1-10 pay $3, person 11 pays $30, for a total tax of $60 on $200 total income, that is 30%.

Case 2, a progressive tax of 1% on income up to $10, and a tax of 80% above that.

Person 1-10 pay $1, Person 11 pays 1% on $10 and pays 80% on $90 which is $72, a total tax of $82 on $200 income, a 41% tax!!!

It seems OP was referring to tax as % of ones income and you are talking taxes as % of GDP is what I was trying to get at.

As an American who lived for a decade in Zurich, I can confirm that the Swiss pay less in taxes.

The big difference is that, in Switzerland, the rich pay taxes.

Unless they are Formula 1 drivers from another country :-)

Maybe it's not a huge factor and I don't know how this comes into the picture, but when I visited Switzerland the cost of food was insanely high.

That does not matter if you talk about it in % of GDP.

this is natural in a country where overall salaries are higher (somehow cashiers in stores also have higher salaries, rent is higher etc.). dining out is especially expensive, but as with all, we can choose how to spend our paychecks

I think what people are missing here is what's left on the table, at the end of a day, for your normal, low to mid level employee, after having paid taxes, insurances and transport to and from work. Swiss pay on average around 300 USD per month for full health coverage and have an average salary of somewhere around 5800 USD, at the low end it starts around 3800 USD. Pension system is in the single digit percentages, as is the few other social insurances we have. Cars are expensive to run, around USD 10k a year. A yearly all-included general public transport subscription (public and private operators of bus, train, ships, mountain cable cars, street cars in all of Switzerland) costs around USD 3000 per year. If you live close to a city it's only around USD 700 a year. So all in all even an average worker can still feed a family of 3-4 people on a single job from 8 to 5 if he takes the public transport and lives somewhere a bit less expensive.

Indeed! I was making no comment on the quality of life in Switzerland which is clearly excellent. They have one of the highest GPDs per capita in the world (especially if you exclude a couple of the oil producers that exceed it).

I was merely commenting on the fact that Switzerland does, in fact, have taxes that are higher than what we have in the US.

Yes, my comment also wasn't meant as a disprove of something you wrote, I just wanted to add the big picture.

Edit: I guess the point I'm trying to make: Switzerland is not all that different from the US (on a small scale), it just combines a moderate amount of corporate liberties with enough personal liberties to strike a good balance. In many ways it's like the Libertarian's small government, locally organized model, it just adds enough social and health insurance safety nets and a good public infrastructure on top. Think every county having their own tax law, school system, road network etc.

Switzerland has one of the lowest tax rates in the world (although it varies from canton to canton). Where do you draw the conclusion from?

He's comparing as a percentage of GDP. I don't know about you but I don't get taxed on my personal GDP, because I reckon I'd be taxed on about 5 times my actual salary since I think that's the amount of profit my company is making per employee.

Is this factoring in state taxes and social security? I know some states don't have income taxes, but that seems to just be a handful.

LOL, sticker tax rates are a joke in poor taste. Look at Total government spending as % GDP (Federal, State, Local).

US broke 40% spending to GDP recently. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_brief.php?brief...

Switzerland spends ~31-34% GDP. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/switzerland/government-spend...

PS: O wait, debt and interest payments don't count... Sorry.

Source of those numbers, please.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...

Be careful with these comparisons. I can't comment on Switzerland, but when I moved from Canada to the U.S., the percentage of my paycheque that was withheld was almost exactly the same. The reason was that while the taxes are higher in Canada, they include healthcare. In the U.S. medical insurance is a separate line item. It may be technically true that the U.S. has lower taxes, but it is very difficult to make comparisons that take into account all external benefits and costs. It would not surprise me if Switzerland had less money available for transportation even though taxes are technically higher.

Health insurance in Suisse, based on permanent employment: employer is obliged to pay you accident insurance, which covers... accidents, full time. Employee is obliged to find health insurance (basically you get ill), otherwise state will find you one randomly. this is paid by employee from net income.

There are various models (GP, doctor on call, semi-private, private etc.), with different franchise, effectively you pay somewhere between 250-500 CHF monthly. Franchise is amount 300-2500 CHF per year that you still pay from your pocket for treatment of illnesses, then insurance kicks in with 100% coverage. Of course the lower the threshold (ie 300), the more you pay per month. Dentists and eye care are almost never covered, only with most expensive ones. FYI CHF=~ USD.

Apart from that dental and eye care, probably the best model I've ever seen. Medical care is top notch, hospitals definitely don't lack proper (often expensive) equipment, rather the issue is there is not enough doctors/nurses.

The big dig was a feeding trough for any construction contractor with any connections to pad their pockets on the taxpayers dime.

When people in other cities complain that raised highways are ugly the civil engineers point to Boston and say "well there's your alternative, take your pick"

I'm not disagreeing with your opinion on long term projects but don't hold up the Big Dig as an example of the way things should be.

Years later, sure the tunnels are cool but they're expensive and can't be upgraded reasonably (a problem with tunnels in general). The Big plans need to be future proofed, something you can still get utility from even if the big picture changes. Highways in tunnels under cities don't fit that (railways are somewhat of a different story IMO). An expressway that bypasses the city, maybe but a normal highway with exits, no way (IMO). The I/O locations (exits) and volumes of a highway change too frequently to invest to heavily in any particular stretch of highway.

I think the culture change that needs to take place isn't the long term outlook but more responsibility with other people's money. You can't have a long term approach to infrastructure while people are trying to squeeze every dollar out of every project. As it stands, the time it takes for something to pay for itself (monetarily, via utility or otherwise) is impractical because the time something like $project stops being "in the red" is long past the time it's a clapped out POS that needs an overhaul.

I think it's worth looking at the beginning of the 20th century when large civil engineering projects were more common for insight into the social/political side of things.

The choice "raised or underground highways, take your pick" is a false dichotomy. The correct choice for urban health is to not build the highway in the first place, or to remove intra-city highways. The trouble is that once they are built the demand for their use becomes self-perpetuating.

Compare San Francisco and Oakland - SF stopped the building of cross-town freeways in the famous "freeway revolt." Oakland was bi-sected by freeways which destroyed neighborhoods, many of which have still not recovered. The worst is the CA-24/I-980 connector.

Switzerland also spends 0.7% of it's annual GDP on defense spending, vs. 3-5% for the US. If we redirected that towards infrastructure we'd rival the best public transit systems in the world.

Thats just pointless argument to make, it serves as nothing other then your personal critic of defense spending.

The US already has a significant amount of spending on infrastructure. Instead of finger point at some other expense, you should ask why the current money is not giving you good results. Schooling has the same issue in the US.

> Thats just pointless argument to make

Defense spending is our third largest expense, behind Social Security and Medicare. It's not a pointless argument to make.

We should be taking a machete to the military industrial complex welfare state in the US.

And If that defense spending is used to fund R&D projects that ultimately benefit society, would you still feel the same way? (ARPAPNet for one example?)

Although the internet was many years ahead of the BBS scene and Fidonet in the sophistication of its technology and its online culture, the BBS scene and Fidonet would have by now become a global network integrated into commerce, government and other aspects of daily life if the internet had not gotten there first. Or the technology behind France's Minitel would have been adopted globally and gotten there. Or something like that.

But it's not; it's used instead to send our aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, etc. into dangerous places and stir up geopolitical trouble. How much research could you fund with the price of a single multi-million-dollar gas station in Afghanistan?

Which of these 19 operational US aircraft carriers are used for R&D and not force projection?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s...

I would love, love, love to see defense spending cut and have a chunk redirected toward non-defense R&D.

But it's too binary to argue that the production of high-tech defense systems (like planes and carriers) doesn't involve a large amount of R&D.

So you're suggesting we keep drowning the department in cash, hoping that one of the projects they build has a happy side effect of not murdering or spying on people.

Take the same money and spend it on R&D projects whose purpose is to benefit society from the get-go.

Defense is a pretty inefficient way to fund R&D. I don't know the numbers but the percentage of the defense budget that actually goes into R&D is probably pretty low.

just one example out of many - F22/F35 program costs (is it still 1.5 trillion USD?), which cover just one tiny (albeit important) piece of US military offensive power (calling it defense is just a bad joke).

plenty of nasty diseases could be put out of existence with just a fraction of that, for example

Its not about if the expense on something else is useful or not. My point was about the effectivness of what is currently spent.

I never thought of that. I mean instead of sending our kids over to get PTSD they could be building shit over here to make life better for everyone.

Yeah without US support of NATO there wouldn't be a Switzerland just nuked out mountains flying post WW 3 soviet flag. Or maybe they would fare better considering their sham pro-hitler neutral actions that saw millions of jews perish during holocaust.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/readings...

Frankly I don't see why HN commenter are so pro tiny European countries which are almost always have sustained due to US military support and are choke full of nativist/racists (Check out white sheep kicking black sheep poster). Be thankful for generous US citizens spending to keep world safe otherwise Europe and Asia would wake up to the next World war within months.

other visitors consider your hateful, ignorant and uninformed post not worthy a comment, but I'll bite - you are wrong, sir, and probably know it.

Plus that funky part about generous US - the world these days would be a much better place if US would just mind their matters for a while. Switzerland couldn't care less about US either, americans are not preferred expats here now (good luck opening a bank account here due to US government foreign policies for expats).

As for tolerance, Switzerland has by far the highest amount of foreigners from whole Europe, and yet it's much safer than any other european country, all religions mixed (ie very strong buddhist community) etc. World could learn a thing or two from this place ;)

Yes Switzerland has by far highest number of foreigners because of its essentialy Xenophobic immigration system rather than anything else. Using that as an example to show how welcoming it is completely deluded. USA offers birthright citizenship and in near future will offer a path to millions of undocumented immigrants. While USA had its own problem it's light years ahead when it comes to countries like Switzerland, where kids whose parents have lived decades in the country and were born their have no path to citizenship.

As far as swiss banks are concerned the world is actually worse off because of corrupt wealth hidden in their accounts. If anything Americans should be happy that one cannot simply open a swiss bank account.

Also to be fair Switzerland is a very compact country although quite mountainous. The length of the train rides, even with very fast trains would have an hard time competing against airplanes in the US. In Switzerland a 3h hour direct, comfortable, Zurich-Geneva train ride isn't much worse than a Zurich-Geneva flight (30 min flight + security and transfer to the city is about 2 hours)

Fun fact: 8M Swiss do 1.8x the passenger kilometers of all of the US combined [1]. I'm pretty sure you have enough densely populated areas in the US that are larger than Switzerland, especially in the East coast.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_count...

There is a bit of mentality too - for Swiss, railroads are part of culture, train stations are always at the heart of a city, and even small places are connected. Train infrastructure is dense.

but it is bloody expensive, plain ticket for 20 km ride costs as much as 5 hour ride on fast train back home. everybody here buys early "ticket" that halves the prices of all tickets for 180 usd

Does it need to be public? Japan has a huge train infrastructure all privately owned AFAIK. Singapore's I'm not sure if it's public or private but it apparently makes a profit.

and this model does not go down well with the American electorate, generally speaking.

Actually, the U.S. government already spends about 41% of GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_perce..., and that's roughly comparable with some European countries. So taxes are already extremely high.

At least on the federal level, about a quarter is spent on Social Security (income transfer), another quarter is spent on healthcare (mostly Medicare, with some Medicaid) and another fifth goes to defense / warfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget.

U.S. tax mostly goes to transfer payments and defense / warfare. Whether that is a good thing is debatable; personally, I'd like to see more innovation and less warfare/welfare (http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Bring...), but by pretty much any reasonable standard the U.S. already pays lots of tax.

You need to squander less of the taxes you raise. The Swiss pay on average less tax than the Americans on a percentage basis. (11% vs 10% to 39%).

Pardon me. I'm going to be just a little more dogmatically right-wing economics than I usually care to be in these pages, but:

> In order to get shiny new trains and big public infrastructure projects like this, you need to pay a lot of tax

That's ideological bullshit that is directly at odds with reality. There's another perfectly good and effective way to get shiny new trains and infrastructure projects, and America is doing it with their freight railroads. It's called private investment, we've been doing a lot of it, very successfully, and railroads have been thriving. (The Economist, in a 2010 article which is linked nearby in this thread, opined that "America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best" and that "They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world.")

What America's railroads don't have is effective private passenger rail. Private investment won't deliver it because it doesn't make economic sense right now. Some of that is for geographical reasons (population density), some of that is regulatory risk (echoes of the regulatory hangover which helped drive the final nail in the coffin when railroads were already facing difficult competition from the growth of air travel and cars, including implicit highway subsidies) and fear of competing with quasi-governmental subsidized entities like Amtrak, some of that is actual market failure and what the economists call path dependency. Government investment in passenger rail in this nation (including high-speed rail) is something that could be meaningfully countenanced in this nation, though, obviously... if people thought they could trust the government to do make it worthwhile. (We'll see how efforts like the California high-speed-rail project will serve to convince people - boondoggle or good idea?)

The US freight rail system may be maintained with private funds, but it was initially constructed with massive public subsidies. These took the form of land grants, not just for the right-of-way, but for surrounding land. This land was then sold to fund the railway development.

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentations...

This is true and accurate. However, substantial ongoing investment in the US rail system in the past 5 decades or so has been mostly private or private-public-partnership.

Americans do pay a lot of taxes...comparable with a lot of European countries (outside of France and Scandinavia). You can't just compare a top marginal tax rate and conclude that one country taxes more than the other...it is the combination of all taxes that determines government revenues.

Our taxes are poorly structured, and the spending of the revenue is poorly prioritized and poorly accounted for. That is the real problem.

Comparing Switzerland to any other country is unfair. It is a tiny country that has done many, many things right in the past and it will hopefully continue to do so. For more information and if you are interested in moving / working here, google my blogpost: "reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT"

First, the size of the country matters quite a lot. Second, the US has an amazing transportation infrastructure, the rail portion just happens to be used to transport cargo and not people. The optimization is different.

This. American freight rail is the marvel of the developed world and the envy of Europe: one of the reasons that recent(ish) government proposals for high-speed passenger rail were dangerous. Ask the Brits: http://www.economist.com/node/16636101

You just don't get to see freight rail in action much unless you're a good bit more blue-collar than the typical HN crowd.

envy of Europe? hat's a bit far-fetched, care to give more details? if you mean by any chance super long trains spanning over kilometer, we have those too

There's a cultural difference too, for example in the terms of Hofstede's theory, Switzerland scores highly on pragmatism: http://geert-hofstede.com/switzerland.html

I'm having a bit of trouble thinking that having an amazing freight system in a country as big and with the diversity of production as the US isn't the definition of pragmatism.

Well, Hofstede's pragmatism dimension is something specific. Sometimes he calls it "Long Term Orientation". It was original identified as a dimension on which East Asian countries strongly differed from the west, and one of the first studies referred to it as "Confucian Work Dynamism".

So, if you prefer to think of it as Confucian Work Dynamism, it's no longer tied to the name of a quality the US would naturally consider itself as having.

Hofstede's project is a bit naively empirical and prone to generalizations, but he's trying to talk about something real.

"the long-term pole corresponds to Bond’s Confucian Work Dynamism. Values found at this pole were perseverance, thrift, ordering relationships by status, and having a sense of shame; values at the opposite, short term pole were reciprocating social obligations, respect for tradition, protecting one's 'face', and personal steadiness and stability" from http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=101...

I'm not surprised that transportation infrastructure is more difficult in a country that is 221 times larger than Switzerland and has less than 1/5th of the population density.

The old population density arguments for poor rail and Internet service don't hold much water when you consider how relatively flat much of the US is, and that even high density areas are often poorly served.

There are plenty of areas in the Us with high population density and they still don't have good infrastructure. They Us has just given up on planning for the future.

Transportation infrastructure in Switzerland is actually quite difficult because you have huge mountains everywhere.

This is a really cool tunnel! It's a single tunnel 57km long and the trains are all-electric. There was a nice comment thread a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10465597

I wonder, what else would the train be other than electric?

In the US most railway lines are not electrified.

That not exactly answers my question and is no surprise ether. I never heard anyone praising the public transportation system of the U.S. also everyone and their childs appear to have 2 cars.

This is simply not the case in Switzerland. Most people take the train/tram if it is not reachable by bike.

Most rail lines in the US are used for freight. Is electric a good option in that case?

SBB Cargo uses electric trains except for the shunters. I can't comment if it's a good idea though.

It is a good idea. SBB started to electify very early (1920s) because they never had a reliable access to oil (especially not in the war times) but lots of hydroelectric power.

Also there is a lot higher traffic densitiy in main lines in Europe which also justifies the cost for building and keeping the infrastructure.

Diesel locomotives are closer to electric cars than they are to diesel cars or trucks--the actual traction motors are electric, and the diesel itself is just a diesel generator for power. This means that the main disadvantages of diesel over electric are sourcing fuel, more moving parts to maintain, and some exhaust issues. However, the US railroad network was essentially built out in the steam era, and steam locomotives have much more severe requirements for all of these problems. Going to diesel from steam was already a win.

The problems with electric trains is needing to supply and maintain catenaries, needing to source enough power, and needing to cope with highly variable electric demand (trains use much more power when they hit a steep incline). In the early 20th century, when railroads were replacing their steam locomotives, the rural electrification projects in the US just didn't exist yet, which made electrification of mainline railroad track quite expensive. The few railroads that tried ended up bankrupting themselves in the process.

Another drawback of electrification that's only obvious in hindsight is that installing catenaries makes enlarging the load gauge that much more costly--if the US had mostly electrified its freight track, it likely would have never developed double-stacked container trains (absent in much of Europe since the electrical catenaries provide insufficient clearance), a development which did much to revitalize the railroad industry.

> I never heard anyone praising the public transportation system of the U.S. also everyone and their childs appear to have 2 cars.

The US has pretty good public transit in the places that have merited it prior to the widespread adoption of the automobile. If the city was large relative to its size today (geographically) in the early 1900s odds are good it's got acceptable to good transit.

The places which have mostly grown after the 1940s tend to have poorer transit as cars came to dominate.

Comparing what works in Switzerland with what works in the US doesn't make that much sense, though. There are plenty of stretches of railway in the western US that might be hundreds of miles between places big enough to warrant a substantial power station. Which means that you're going to have to pull hundreds of miles of high voltage lines (which aren't free) in order to have a stationary power plant power the all-electric locomotive. Or you can just drag around your own power plant, sans wires everywhere; a diesel.

To go beyond that, cities that grew after the 1940s often have relatively poor transit access to the "new" sections. For example, the DC Metro system is only halfway through finally opening up service to the enormous northern North Virginia area and utterly failed to even provide halfassed streetcar service to Alexandria. New York City's subway system doesn't attempt to cross over into Jersey or even to the eastern half of Queens.

> New York City's subway system doesn't attempt to cross over into Jersey or even to the eastern half of Queens.

There are other systems that do, though: PATH (for points immediately across the Hudson), NJTransit (commuter rail to a lot of NJ), LIRR (commuter rail to Long Island & Queens) and MetroNorth (commuter rail to points north in NY and CT).

Given how long it takes to ride the subway to the farther reaches of Queens (e.g., Jamaica), I can't imagine how long it would take to commute to Manhattan via subway from, say, Bayside Queens (which is served by LIRR).

Diesel trains are still very common in many parts of the world.

Yeah, in Switzerland they are pretty uncommon for civil transportation, but very common for transportation of goods, considering that a lot of big companies have private rails connecting warehouses to the national network that, ofc these rails are w/o electric wires.

I beg to differ, I see and sometimes use diesel trains on a daily basis in .ch

But that's not to take away from Switzerland having a very high percentage of trains being electric only.

Which one? I use SBB and BLS regulary and i never noticed anything else than electric. (Really just wondering as i have no idea)

me too, I travel regularly from Basel to Lugano, daily in the Bern - Zürich, also using regional trains and never saw a diesel machine for passengers transportation, except for some rare unexpected cases.

I traveled some times from Zürich to Munich and saw that in the German side, rails have no electricity and then the SBB are forced to use a diesel powered machine, but except for that, I still have to find a connection where the diesel machine is necessary every time, I am curious!

Actually, due to increasing traffing from Switzerland to Munich, Deutsch Bahn decided last year to upgrade and electrify the connection from Lindau up to ( I think ) Geltendorf.

I'm based in Zürich, and the only time I've seen diesel trains is when I find a mountain railway or funicular.

Wintherthur/Zürich - i'd say i see at least 1 per day, mostly S trains. Some IC do the St. Gallen run with diesel at homeward rush hour.

Don't get me wrong, it's not huge numbers, but I see 'em.

Really never noticed anything, given i didnt look for it ether. Probably will in the future, kudos.

Actually, having bothered to pay more attention this morning on the way in, I noticed that the engines that I assumed were diesel were in actual fact electric; I had just assumed diesel from the shape and behaviour.

So, disregard my blathering, I stand corrected (hopefully!)

Yep yep. Just sayin', that's what else they'd be. :)

That said, for 250km/h and up, electric is pretty much standard for rolling stock. It's a bit less common to have the freight going through the same infrastructure be all mandated to be electric too though.

(Also now that I look more into it, it's unclear that it's mandated that the trains that go through the tunnel be electric. In fact, Swiss Railways just bought some new rolling stock for maintenance that's hybrid electric/diesel (uses electric only when overhead power works, diesel otherwise) which makes sense for maintenance, but likely means the tunnel is perfectly equipped to deal with diesel emissions from trains. In addition, before they completed the overhead work, in 2014 they announced that diesel trains could transit the tunnel. Not open publicly, but that the capability existed. Anyway. Interesting question whether they actually require all rolling stock transiting the tunnel to be electric, and if so, why. I'm guessing it just currently happens that all the scheduled trains traversing the tunnel are electric, so the poster said "all electric".)

Steam.

I am pretty sure you cant do that near any modern city because of the smog. Or sure you could, but not if you care about a nice city image.

http://www.brienz-rothorn-bahn.ch/en/experience/railway.html

This kind of proofs my point. This thing is a mountain train, there are not cities that could be considered big on the way at all. Its also a nice experience :)

Switzerland is awesomely-electrified, but there are still branch lines that don't have overhead wires. Diesel locomotives (actually, the Diesel generators generate electricity that then powers the traction motors) are still in common use all over the world.

Swiss innovate a lot in locomotive tech. (ABB and Stadler are 2 big companies that do a lot of electric loco R&D) The TILO (Ticino Lombardia) Swiss trains (S10, Stadler FLIRT) can run on both 15kv AC (Swiss) or 3kv DC (Italy) power systems when they cross the borders. No de-boarding and re-boarding to a different train is required. http://www.tilo.ch/en/Azienda/Treni.html

The cascade tunnel, longest rail tunnel in the US with 12.5km isn't electrified and has only diesel trains running through it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Tunnel

I imagine such tunnel needs vertical vents every x meters or there would be funny air compression effects or rarified air issues?

They need a lot of airway and exit tunnels - and not just for compression effects - a tunnel can become a very dangerous place very quickly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel#The_1999_fir...

57km (35.4 miles) may sound impressive enough in isolation, but it's not until you start putting it into real-world context that you realize just how monumental a tunnel this is: Imagine driving any of these commutes entirely underground:

- The Chicago Loop to Naperville (31 miles)

- SF SOMA to Palo Alto (33 miles)

- Midtown Manhattan to Perth Amboy (32 miles)

~Wall Street to Westchester County (35 miles)

Living in Chicago, the Chicago Loop - Naperville comparison hit me....wow! That's quite an accomplishment.

The public transport in Switzerland is really superb, haven't seen anything like it anywhere else.

All neighbour countries have very similar public transport.

not true at all, I can attest French public transport for example is slow and basic compared to swiss one (apart from TGV trains, which covers just few main places). In Switzerland, you don't have to use car because train will get you there as fast/faster than car in most cases. good luck with that anywhere around unless you travel between train stations.

well, then almost all neighbor countries.

France is a special case anyway, as it's road/railway infrastructure is very focused to connect everything with Paris as the center point.

Ah, they seem to have found a new use for the LHC tunnel :)

I guess they could use the train tunnel as particle accelerator during downtimes :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com