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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

No doubt Swiss train network is excellent.

If we are to trust to published statistics form other countries for 2018, and using for the Swiss system, the 2021 data mentioned in the article: "about 92% of passenger trains were on-time" this would make it for punctuality, somewhat middle of the league. Behind Poland, Greece and Bulgaria for example.

This is assuming being on time is: "a delay of five minutes or less". For Swiss network the article uses the definition: "a delay of three minutes or less".

"Share of regional and local passenger rail services classified as punctual in Europe in 2018, by country": https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255048/punctuality-regi...

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The point is that Switzerland maintains this level of punctuality in addition to connecting the entire country, down to the village. That "down to the village" bit is the part that very few other public transport systems in the world have managed to get right, including those alternatives in your list.

Of course, as you say this is about trusting the published statistics from the country itself. In the case of Switzerland, I can say from anecdotal experience that 92% is probably very close to the truth, if that helps?

I think GP's point was also that the Swiss look middle-of-the-league only when comparing their strict definition (>3m is counted as a delay) with the looser definition used by other countries (>5m is counted as a delay). Presumably, if trains with a 4- or 5-minute delay were not counted as delayed, more than 92% of Swiss trains would be on time.

Fun fact, if a train is cancelled in Belgium, it doesn't count in the delayed statistics :)

It's thus probably also worth counting the number of trips - I don't have numbers, but I have a feeling that SBB runs much more passenger trains daily than Polish or other systems do.

The trains run more often and go to more places than any other place I've ever been to.

Because they way Switzerland is structured both in terms of administration and geography I don't think that a village in Switzerland is equivalent to a village in most other countries. Presumably the canton system results in more smaller cities and large villages, and the terrain means they are in a limited number of places. The largest cities are all within 100 km of each other. While a single trip in a large country can be longer than the entire length of Switzerland. It will of course be easier to match a timetable with short predictable distances at lower speeds.

200km/h is "lower speeds"? That's the nominal speed of IC trains between Swiss population centers.

And Switzerland is quite a tiny country, so more than 200kph isn't worth it. Regular rail connected by wire will require much more maintenance going faster.

I think there are pros and cons to both structures. Villages in Switzerland are well separated by geography that is physically difficult to overcome (i.e. mountains), even if the distances are not big. It's way easier to lay down a flat, long rail between 2 cities in, say, the US or Mexico than it is to do the same in Switzerland.

The structure would probably need to change for larger countries though, it's true. But you could keep a lot of it; create long distance rails between major cities with stops along these rails for smaller towns to feed into. Some European countries have this type of structure, Italy for example, though it does get very tricky for the very smallest villages

The really smaller villages in the mountains are only connected by postal bus. The villages in the valley and what I could call small towns are connected by train, but it is far from ubiquitous.

True, the density gets much lower in the villages and especially those in the mountains. But for the average person in _most_ of the Swiss villages there is some connection they can take to get to where they need to go (though it may not always be the fastest, depending on where you live)

> The largest cities are all within 100 km of each other.

They're not.

Zurich is 225km from Lausanne and 125km from Bern. Geneva is 254km from Basel, 371km from Lugano, 265km from Lucerne and 277km from Zurich.

I think the opposite of your claim is closer to the truth (though it also has exceptions) than your claim.

As an American living in a suburban Swiss village taking the bus into Geneva, I don’t think the bus was more than 1 minute late once every hundred days. And I was pretty far along on the line. It was staggeringly punctual.

Hopefully European countries aren't prone to manipulating the statistics. An example that used to happen in my (Australian) city: if a train was running late, they'd skip stations: magically, it now arrived at its destination on time!

Was on a Swiss train that did exactly this yesterday. To be fair, the delay originated in Italy (20 minutes late)and there was a minimal impact for people wanting to get to or leave from that city (Bern) as passenger on the affected train could get off one stop early and then catch another train to finish their leg and passengers trying to board the train in Bern just had to catch another train to the subsequent stop (Olten) to get on the late train there.

Finally, this was the first time in over 20 years of light rail use in Switzerland that I experienced this.

> Was on a Swiss train that did exactly this yesterday.

Though there's usually replacement trains for those use cases. The main stations have a standby train (Dispozug) ready to immediately replace any train that's cancelled or delayed (and avoid propagating delays).

https://twitter.com/SBBTrainDriver/status/150809526141493657... (is an example, the driver spends 3h+ just waiting in the train in case it needs to replace another train)

In my European country if a train was running very late they could turn around the train some stops earlier, thereby not servicing the stations further down the track. Since the train would never arrive there it implied it also couldn't be late and thus it would not be counted in the statistics as such.

The rail company has a government-imposed punctuality target and their result is used in the calculation of how much money they get from the government the next year, i.e. the usual "once a KPI becomes a target..."

German Rail did that: translated presentation from German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGCmPLWZKd8 (with a translator that sadly breathes into the mic...)

German rail has what we call the Profalla-Wende (a "turn" named after the former minister of transport). If a train is sufficiently delayed, and at the final destination would turn around to do the same trip in the other direction, it might skip the last few stops and just turn around earlier. Now the train is on time, skipped stops aren't counted in the statistic, the ripple effects from tracks and stations blocked by the delayed train are gone, and everyone who wanted to go to the final destination is skrewed.

I don't know about the statistics reported to the European level but most Dutch railways don't take into account "cancelled" trains when determining punctuality. A train is "cancelled" when it's 30 minutes late and therefore doesn't alter the punctuality scores.

It does stop at all stops unless it's really late and passengers might as well get out at a stopover station and transfer trains, however if it's sufficiently delayed it may be put on side tracks to let other trains pass to prevent a ripple effect, delaying the train even more to keep the rest of the system working well.

Currently on the phone so can’t add many sources, but I think you can’t really compare the punctually of trains across european countries like this. E.g if I remember correctly in Germany, a train is late after 5 minutes 59 seconds, whereas Switzerlands threshold is 2:59. Also Switzerland measures delays at arrival at destination, not departure from origin. I don’t really know about other countries thought.

https://company.sbb.ch/de/ueber-die-sbb/verantwortung/die-sb...

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