Open access in Switzerland

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.

Posted in: Uncategorized | December 21, 2004 8:38 am