The Country That Runs on a Clock

In 1982 Switzerland did something no other country had done: it stopped designing train timetables around trains and started designing them around connections. Every service into a major station was scheduled to arrive just before the hour, wait, and leave just after — so that any train met every other train, everywhere, all day, with the same pattern repeating hourly.

The Taktfahrplan is the reason a country with mountains in the way of everything has the most usable public transport in Europe, and it is the reason hiring a car here is usually the worse decision.

What the four minutes are for

A Swiss connection with four minutes between arrival and departure is not optimistic. It is designed, and the platform will be the one across the tracks. Postbuses in valleys with no railway are timed to the train that feeds them, and they wait if it is late — the driver knows, because the system tells him.

This has an infrastructural cost that is worth understanding. To make the pattern work, journey times between hubs must be just under a whole number of half-hours. Where the geography did not cooperate, Switzerland dug — the Zurich cross-city link, the base tunnels through the Alps. The country built the mountains out of the way to protect a timetable.

Most railways ask how fast a train can go. This one asked what time it needed to arrive, and then built whatever was necessary to arrive then.

The pass arithmetic

A Swiss Travel Pass covers trains, postbuses, boats and city transport, and gives 50 per cent off most mountain railways. It is expensive and it usually wins, because the mountain railways are where the money goes: a single return to Jungfraujoch costs more than two days of the pass.

Do the sum against your actual plan rather than taking either side on faith. A trip that sits in one valley and walks will not justify a pass. A trip that moves every second day and goes up something almost always will.

Half-board and other economies

Switzerland is expensive and there are two levers. Mountain guesthouses offer half-board that is routinely cheaper than eating à la carte twice, and the food is better than the price suggests. Supermarkets — Coop and Migros — are ordinary European prices, and every station has one open late.

The third lever is season. Mountain railways close in stages for maintenance in spring and late autumn, and accommodation in the same weeks costs a fraction of July. Check the individual railway before planning a day around it, because a closed cable car in a valley with no road is a wasted day.