The story
In the 19th century, all Swiss railways were owned by private ventures. The economic and political interests of these companies led to lines being built in parallel and some companies went bankrupt in the resulting competition. On 20 February 1898, the Swiss people agreed in a referendum to the creation of a state-owned railway company.
Later that year, the Federal Assembly approved the purchase of Schweizerische Centralbahn (SCB) to operate trains on behalf of the federal government. The first train running on the account of the Swiss Confederation ran during the night of New Year's Eve 1900/New Year's Day 1901 from Zurich via Bern to Geneva, and received a ceremonial welcome upon arriving in Bern. SBB's management board was first formed in mid-1901, and added the Schweizerische Nordostbahn (NOB) to the system on 1 January 1902. This date is now observed as the "official" birthday of SBB.
The following railway companies were nationalised:
Aargauische Südbahn (ASB)
Bötzbergbahn (BöB)
Schweizerische Nordostbahn (NOB)
Schweizerische Centralbahn (SCB)
Toggenburgerbahn (TB)
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Vereinigte Schweizerbahnen (VSB)
Tösstalbahn including the Wald-Rüti Railway (WR)
Wohlen-Bremgarten Railway (WB)
Jura-Simplon-Bahn (JS) including the Brünigbahn (the latter in 1903)
Other companies were included later, and the rail network was extended. It is still growing today.
The Gotthard Railway was added in 1909, the Jura-Neuchâtelois in 1913, the Tösstal Railway in 1918, the Seetal Railway in 1922 and the Uerikon–Bauma Railway in 1948. The Brünig railway came with the Jura–Simplon Railway, and the Lake Constance fleet with the Swiss Northeastern Railway.
The new SBB had a great deal of renovation to do. Accounting was centralized from the start and technical standards were unified. The old administrations of the former private railways were placed, through district railway councils, under the general directorate, the board of directors and thus the federal authorities. Except for the lines of the Gotthard Railway and part of the Jura–Simplon network, the installations were in poor condition. The purchase prices exceeded the estimate by 20%, although the estimated real value of the installations was 10% below it. More powerful locomotives with higher axle loads required extensive work on the infrastructure, and the renovation of large stations and the doubling of lines were costly. As a new line, the SBB completed in 1906 the Simplon line begun by the Jura–Simplon Railway, with the Simplon Tunnel, then the longest tunnel in the world (second bore 1922). The SBB began to replace their rolling stock, made up of many small series, with standard classes.
In the interwar period, the railway administration was centralized and the network electrified. The administrative apparatus, soon mocked as Direktorenhypertrophie (an excess of directors), was slimmed down: the number of board members was cut by three quarters and the number of general directors halved. The former Central Railway administration in Basel was attached to the Lucerne district directorate in 1923, and the St. Gallen district to the Zurich district directorate. Before the First World War, the electrical companies Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon (MFO) and Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC) had each converted an SBB line to electric operation at their own risk. For the further electrification of the network, the SBB at first adopted the three-phase technology of the Simplon line rather than the more promising single-phase alternating current technology developed by MFO, which was preferred only under the impact of the coal shortage during the First World War. Despite the unstable economy of the interwar years and growing debt, electrification was pushed ahead: the SBB built their own power plants (Piotta, Amsteg, Barberine), commissioned new types of locomotives and sped up the construction of overhead lines. Around the middle of the century, 99.5% of the SBB network was electrified, a degree of electrification unique in the world.
The federal act on the SBB of 1944 allowed a one-time debt relief, the creation of endowment capital and restructuring measures, which led to good operating results until the end of the 1960s. Despite large investments in junction and marshaling yards and in the modernization of lines and rolling stock, the railways' share of traffic fell rapidly compared with road traffic, which received two to five times the public funds provided for the railways. From 1987, additional subsidies for reduced fares, the clock-face timetable, the Rail 2000 project and the S-Bahn networks allowed the railways to win back shares of passenger traffic. In the same period, local freight services were drastically reduced. More emphasis was placed on combined rail–road freight transport, for example with the parcel company Cargo Domizil from 1985 (sold in 1996), and on the expansion of the transit routes, with the New Rail Link through the Alps (NRLA) from 1992 and planned cooperation in transport with the Italian State Railways. The revised Railway Act of 1996 released the Confederation and the SBB from obligations in regional transport. In sparsely populated areas for which no cantonal or municipal funds could be made available, this led to cuts after a decade of expanding services.
First class compartments were discontinued on 3 June 1956, and second and third class accommodation was reclassified as first and second class, respectively.
On 1 January 1999 the Swiss Federal Railway has been excluded from the Federal Administration and became a fully state-owned (the federal state owns 100% of all shares) limited company regulated by public law (German: Spezialgesetzliche Aktiengesellschaft).
In 1982, SBB introduced the Taktfahrplan (clock-face schedule), with trains for certain destinations leaving every 60 minutes, greatly simplifying the timetable.
On 12 December 2004 the first phase of Bahn2000, an ambitious programme to improve the company's services, was put into effect. The core element was the Zurich HB–Bern–Basel SBB triangle, where travel times between the cities was reduced to under one hour, resulting in good connections from these stations for most trains. Some connections between cities got two trains in each direction per hour or more, and the S-Bahn services were intensified to four or more trains per hour. Because of these changes, 90% of the timetable was changed, 12% more trains were scheduled and travel times generally improved. It was the greatest timetable change since the introduction of the Taktfahrplan.
For this change to be possible, large parts of the infrastructure had to be modified and many stations were rebuilt, for instance the line from Ziegelbrücke to Sargans or Bern main station, which got the "wave of Bern", a bridge over the tracks to provide better access to the platforms and the city centre.
On 22 June 2005, a short circuit on a long-distance power transmission line in central Switzerland led to a chain reaction. The entire Swiss railway network was out of service during rush hour and an estimated 200,000 people and 1,500 trains were stuck at stations or somewhere on the track. It turned out that the SBB power transmission network was overloaded and did not provide enough redundancy to tolerate the shutdown of the four cable Amsteg-Steinen power line due to construction work. So, the power grid was split in two parts, the northern half being overloaded and the southern half having a load reduction for the SBB power plants are situated in the southern part (the Alps), while most of the power is needed in the northern part (the Swiss plateau). The situation led to high-voltage fluctuations and finally breakdown and emergency shutdown of the entire power supply.
In the same year, the Swiss Federal Railways received the Wakker Prize, an award given out by the Swiss Heimatschutz (an institution aiming to preserve significant buildings), which is usually only granted to communes, for their extraordinary efforts. The Swiss Federal Railways have many listed buildings from well-known architects such as Herzog & de Meuron, Santiago Calatrava, and Max Vogt.
In May 2010, SBB's first integrated network control centre opened in Lausanne, to supervise all of SBB's network in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Another integrated control centre will be opened in Zurich.
All trains and most buildings have been made non-smoking since the timetable change of 11 December 2005.
By the end of 2006, the corporation was handed over from the long-term CEO Benedikt Weibel to his successor Andreas Meyer.
On 13 January 2019, Bloomberg reported that SBB was in talks with German aviation company Lilium GmbH to create air taxis to carry customers from train stations to their final destination.
From Wikipedia’s article on Swiss Federal Railways, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5