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Issue 4 2006, Past issues / 28 July 2006 /
Rolling stock maintenance at SBB AG has been affected by a number of trends: increasingly fierce competition, rising pressure on costs, Europe-wide overcapacity, increasingly heavy use of rolling stock with each timetable change, and ever shorter idle periods. Against this backdrop, there is a pressing need to deploy existing resources more efficiently and thereby improve productivity. SBB Passenger Traffic has set itself the goal of raising productivity at Operating Maintenance by 20% within three years and to shorten rolling stock throughput times by 30%.
SBB has a passenger fleet of 330 main-line locomotives, 63 multiple units, 251 self-propelled cars, 456 driving trailers, 2,650 passenger coaches and 58 shunting locomotives. Each day, 1,143 long-distance trains cover a total of 190,752km and 3,212 regional-service trains cover 144,755km.
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Issue 1 2006, Past issues / 14 February 2006 /
AlpTransit Gotthard is creating a flat rail link for future travel through the Alps. At the heart of the new transalpine rail route is the world’s longest tunnel – the 57km Gotthard Base Tunnel. This pioneering achievement of the 21st Century will bring major improvements to travel and transportation systems in the heart of Europe.
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Issue 1 2006, Past issues / 14 February 2006 /
Network safety is an issue for both railway undertakings and infrastructure managers, not only with regard to ensuring railway safety but also with regard to establishing a manage-ment system that will guarantee safety remains affordable.
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Issue 4 2005, Past issues / 3 November 2005 /
After having long assumed responsibility for technical aspects linked to traffic safety and installations, railway undertakings have progressively been taking over management of the day-to-day security problems of persons and trains.
Much as safety-related aspects used to be a core part of the trade as assumed and claimed, so enabling the railways to build their image around the reliability of this transport mode, correspondingly security-related problems have long been perceived as being an exogenous constraint imposed by events, and over which railway undertakings had very little legitimacy.
Railways therefore structured their responses in reaction to events that implicated them because these events had occurred on their premises or trains, and contributed to the development of an insecure environment that was negative with respect to customers and staff alike, without the responses having for that matter necessarily integrated this recent phenomenon as part of their prerequisites for normal operations to take place.
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Issue 3 2005, Past issues / 23 August 2005 /
The demands placed in Sweden on our vehicles of long-distance travel differ considerably from those in other countries. For instance, in our small yet densely populated country, dedicated high speed lines, with trains running at 300km/h or more, do not make sense.
Nevertheless, we have some new lines for fast-moving traffic, but these have mostly been aligned in tunnels to reconcile them with concerns of landscape protection. They allow a top speed of just 200km/h, this being a pre-condition for making our enhanced regular-interval timetable of the Rail 2000 scheme work.
This new system timetable, in operation since 12 December 2004, connects the cities in a half-hourly rhythm. In the stations of the big hubs, trains arrive shortly before 30 minutes and 60 minutes and depart a few minutes after, providing for smooth connections among themselves and with the regional and S-Bahn trains that are integrated into the system.
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Issue 2 2005, Past issues / 31 May 2005 /
SBB Infrastructure has started an extensive programme to improve the availability and reliability of its network in order to guarantee the service level after the substantial expansion of the train schedule.
On December 12 2004, SBB made a great leap forward. Overnight the new Rail 2000 schedule saw an increase of train kilometres by 14%. The majority of Swiss cities now enjoy train connections twice every hour. Local traffic in and around urban centres such as Berne, Lucerne, Zug and in the Italian part of Switzerland were also improved at the same time. The change was substantial as 90% of the train departures had to be adapted to fit the new schedule.
The basis for the biggest improvement of the passenger train schedule since the introduction of the interval timetable in 1982 was the completion of a new railway line in the heart of the Swiss train network. SBB took into service 45km of double track between Bern and Olten and 10km of single track between Solothurn and its interconnection to the new line near the town of Herzogenbuchsee. The two merging lines from Bern and Solothurn form a ‘Y’ toward the east and improve journey times between Bern/Biel and cities such as Zurich, Basle and Lucerne by 10 to 15 minutes. The new line took eight years to build and cost nearly CHF 1.7 billion.
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Issue 2 2005, Past issues / 31 May 2005 /
Switzerland and Austria are investing heavily in new locomotives for trans-Alpine freight work, along with regional trains for local passenger networks.
Switzerland’s railways have benefited in past years from a pro-rail political consensus that has allowed heavy investment in the network. The latest fruit of this policy was the opening of the Mattstetten-Rothrist cut-off line in December last year, which allowed implementation of the Bahn 2000 timetable with its standard-interval pattern and enhanced end-to-end journey times. Work is proceeding on the Simplon and Gotthard base tunnels under the Alps, which will boost capacity on these routes.
Rail patronage in the country reflects the excellent standard of service that steady investment has made possible. The average Swiss citizen makes 40 train journeys each year, more than any other country in Europe (the figure for the next in the league, Denmark, is 28).
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