TrainBlog by Marcel Marchon

The three largest Swiss cities now all have projects to extend their “S-Bahn” (regional/commuter rail networks) systems with new rail lines crossing the city centers and adding stations in central locations or at least enabling new through routings of previously unconnected commuter lines, thus making suburb-to-suburb connections easier.

- Basel:
The “Herzstück Basel” project (http://www.herzstueck-basel.ch/) calls for a new rail line (mostly in a tunnel) connecting the Hauptbahnhof and Badischer Bahnhof stations with intermediate stops in the city center. The layout of the new link should enable new connections from almost every commuter line to all the central stations in the city.

- Geneve:
The CEVA projects (http://www.geneve.ch/ceva/) seeks to connect the existing SNCF line from Annemasse terminating at the outlying Eaux-Vives station to the SBB line at the La Praille freight yard (close to where the new Lancy-Pont Rouge station is located). The line would serve both S-Bahn and Intercity trains.

- Zurich:
The “Löwenstrasse Station” project (http://www.bahn2000zh.ch/Lowen.htm) calls for a new (third) subterranean addition to the Zurich Main Station that is connected to a new line to Zurich Oerlikon (with connections to the lines to Schaffhausen, Winterthur and Dübendorf). This would replace the current temporary Sihlpost station that is used by all S-Bahn trains that do not use the current Museumstrasse subterranean station. Some preliminary work connected with this project has already been done during the recent construction work at Zurich Main Station (platform enlargement for tracks 3 - 9) in preparation for the Bahn 2000 schedule.

The big question for all these projects is - where will the money come from…?

…or are there maybe better alternatives?

Extending the BART line to San Jose is a very costly project, but this is currently favoured by VTA - although they seem to be the only people that want it. There seem to exist far better options or ways to spend that money (there’s talk of 4 billion US$) that would benefit a far greater number of people and/or locations.

One project that would certainly benefit from that money is the Caltrain electrification project - I have to admit myself, being used to European/Swiss railroading, seeing these diesel locomotives labouring to accelerate one of those trains looks kind of ridiculous. It would seem that a trainset of EMUs would be so much more efficient and faster to accelerate out of the station. Plus, those diesels are really noisy …

On the subject of BART alternatives - I can recommend the website of the Bay Rail Alliance.

Over the long Christmas weekend, I had a chance to finally take a first good look at the new Swiss timetable (the printed version - it’s way better to just read in it than the online version - the latter is really “only” good for looking up a point-to-point schedule) and here’s a first posting of some interesting details (this kind of follows up on my earlier post about short headways).

Zürich Hauptbahnhof - Zürich Altstetten - Killwangen/Spreitenbach
(you need to read tables #650/#700/#710 to find all these trains).
At the peak of the full hour outbound “flow” out of Zürich Hauptbahnhof, there are 5 trains scheduled within 2 minutes of each other going from Zürich outbound on the common line to Killwangen (where the lines to Baden-Brugg and Lenzburg diverge):

.58 Interregio 20xx (Schaffhausen)-Zürich HB-Olten-Bern
.00 Intercity 8xx Romanshorn-Zürich HB-Bern-Interlaken Ost/Brig
.02 Intercity 7xx Chur-Zürich HB-Basel
.04 ICN (1)5xx St. Gallen-Zürich HB-Biel-Lausanne/Geneve
.06 Interregio 19xx Zürich HB-Brugg-Olten-Bern

and then, ~4 minutes later, there will be another train:

(.10) (departing Zürich Altstetten at .15) Interregio 20xx Zürich Flughafen-Zürich Altstetten-Baden-Basel

This will be repeated every hour - and the same trains also go the other way, arriving inbound at Zürich HB shortly before the full hour. Plus, there’s another smaller “wave” of trains before and after the half hour point.

In recent years, open access to rail routes has become a big thing in Europe. However, we are still in a transition phase here, with some countries still seeing very little “new” operators running on their rail lines (e.g. France) and other countries seeing quite a lot of new traffic. This of course is quite interesting for us railfans, since it adds new interesting color schemes to all those favorite rail routes.

One example is the Gotthard north-south transit route in Switzerland. A few years ago, the only thing you were able to see there were SBB’s trains. But now, there are several freight operators running trains over this route:
- SBB Cargo
- BLS Cargo in cooperation with Railion
- TX Logistik
- rail4chem

A similar situation exists on other European alpine transit routes, e.g. the Brenner route in Austria/Italy.

According to a report here, the Black Thunder coal mine in the Powder River basin (Wyoming) just shipped it’s 1,000,000,000th ton of coal (more than any other coal mine in the world) - and all of that was shipped out by railroad! Black Thunder is the second largest coal mine in North America, producing 62 million tons in 2003 (the largest is it’s Powder River Basin neighbor North Antelope Rochelle, with 80 million tons a year). It alone produces almost 10 percent of the US coal supply.

The new Re 484 class locomotives of SBB Cargo are now certified for use in both Switzerland (15 kV AC) and Italy (3 kV DC). This is good news for the Swiss freight operator, since they now operate more through services from Germany to Italy with the new schedule. Note that these new locomotives can only be used in Switzerland and Italy, but not in other European countries (Germany, etc.), although they are technically able to run under all 4 common voltage systems in Europe. For cost reasons, they are only being equipped with the train control systems for Switzerland and Italy and will primarily be used between Bellinzona and Italy (i.e. to the south of the Gotthard tunnel).

This article here reports that the Swiss Federal Railways are able to achieve separation times of 100 seconds between two trains running at 160 km/h (~100 mph) on the new rail line between Mattstetten (Bern) and Rothrist (Olten). And this with a system that uses fixed lineside signals! Not bad, I think…

So people in Switzerland can now benefit from the new services offered after last weekend’s schedule change. I must admit I miss being able to go out there and try out some of the new lines and services - but maybe I will get the opportunity to do that next spring…

Overland Models AC6000CW (UP #7003)

I’m not really all that much into Model Railroading, but every once in a while, there is something that appeals to me - I do have my little garden railroad and a few Overland Models brass diesel locomotives on a shelf, but that’s about it.

Now Athearn has brought out its new Genesis model of the Challenger and this is something that I might get. Plus, it’s only $229.99 here…