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ThePadawan

The Swiss railway has a (DE/FR/IT only) page at [0] to explain what they do.

- Start adjusting the tension on tracks starting in March when it gets warmer

- Use more expensive concrete sleepers where high forces appear (as TFA mentions)

- Cool exceptionally problematic parts of the track with water from tank cars

So in summary:

- spend money

That could explain why Network Rail isn't keen on doing any of that.

[0] https://company.sbb.ch/de/medien/dossier-medienschaffende/so...

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Despite saving all that money, the UK has the most expensive train ticket prices in Europe:

https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/train-prices-across-e...

And most of that money (apart from the recently nationalised operators like Northern, ScotRail and LNER) goes back to the foreign-ran railways (Abellio/Netherlands, Amey/Keolis/France, Arriva/Germany).

It's ace!

And the least generous seat pitch and the slowest journey times on trunk routes.

> - Start adjusting the tension on tracks starting in March when it gets warmer

And of course this also implies adjusting the tension on the tracks starting in October or so, too!

It’s amazing how many problems are solvable simply by spending money.

A very Swiss attitude.

Like that time in 2016 when a Swiss town paid a 290k CHF fine rather than house Syrian refugees [0]!

[0] https://lenews.ch/2016/06/16/swiss-town-pays-instead-of-taki...

Yes that's shameful behavior. Good thing there are 5000 other communes that take their social responsibilities seriously.

Similarly in France there's a minimum percentage of social housing cities larger than X have to have, and some rich cities prefer paying the fine to actually building the required amounts of social housing.

It's amazing how many problems are solvable when a society chooses to solve them.

Note that the Swiss railway is charged fines for lateness to be paid to the state - so while I wouldn't say it's impossible that they just went and decided to take these measures to prevent rail buckling proactively, it's just as likely that they did the cost vs. payoff math.

So yes, society did solve this problem by electing officials who put those clauses into the railway's operating license - but there are a lot of steps in there that shouldn't be overlooked.

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