2nd March 2020 · ‘Railways of Zurich’
Presenter: Ken Follett
On Monday 2nd March Ken Follett gave a presentation entitled “The Railways of Zurich” to a smaller than usual Northampton audience at the Wellingborough Museum. Ken has made a number of visits to Zurich from 1985 and outlined the substantial changes made up to the present time.
Zurich is a city of about 500,000 population and also has a considerable input of commuters from the surrounding regions. It has direct main line rail services with France (TGV) and Germany, both of which are serviced by double deck emus. It also has services from Italy via Chur and the Swiss capital Bern, many of which continue to Zurich airport after reversing. The main station (Zurich Hautbahnhof- HB) was mainly a terminal with 22 platforms, of which only two were through platforms. Traffic which was for further destinations had to be reversed out of the platforms as push-pull as there was no facility for the locomotives to be relocated to the other end of the train. This problem is now less important as many Swiss trains now consist of emus. In 2000 HB was expanded by adding a further 4 underground through platforms and a two way tunnel under the Limmat River to connect a rebuilt Löwenstrasse station in East Zurich. This provided a direct connection in place of that via Zurich airport at about 50Km.
A further tunnelling project (Durchmesserlinie-DML), to ease further congestion, was undertaken and completed in 2015 vastly improving the access to Zurich airport from all parts of the city.
As mentioned previously the traditional electric locomotive hauled trains have largely been replaced by custom built emus, generally double decker, by Siemens, Bombardier and Stadler.
The second part of the presentation consisted of a review of several of the well known Swiss trains, such as the Glacier Express and Bernina Express. Also included was the UNESCO adopted Albula line from Chur to Tirano in Italy, famous for its outstanding viaducts and tunnels including the 360-degee spiral loop into Italy.