The Swiss National Council has committed to spending 16 billion francs on repairs to rail lines in Switzerland. Due to underinvestment, rail providers have failed to adequately keep up with repairs, with some fearing the Swiss network could soon resemble the rail chaos seen across the border in Germany.

Swiss parliament to spend 16 billion francs on railway maintenance

At a vote on Monday, the National Council approved a plan to spend 16,4 billion francs on maintaining the railway network between 2025 and 2028, 2 billion more than it had originally planned. Half of the money will go to Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), while the rest will be distributed among regional public transport providers. This funding will not be impacted by the upcoming federal austerity measures.

According to figures from SBB and the government itself, Switzerland’s rail network has failed to keep up with maintenance in the past years. According to the latest Network Status Report from the Federal Office for Transport (FOT), public transport providers have ramped up the number of rail services offered, without keeping up with maintenance.

Swiss rail providers not keeping up with maintenance

The sheer number of new services has led to a significant increase in wear and tear. As a result, the FOT expects that 230 kilometres of track, switches and other crucial infrastructure will have to be renewed every year to avoid delays and reliability issues. Due to budget constraints, SBB was only able to repair 184 kilometres of track in 2023.

SBB explained that while this will not lead to delays or safety issues in the short term, it admitted that its own systems are “increasingly outdated” and that more needs to be invested so that it can "continue to operate with the same level of safety, availability and reliability." 

SBB faces an 8-billion franc maintenance backlog

To demonstrate this, SBB operates a metric which calculates how much it would cost for the railways in Switzerland to achieve an "optimal state" - when track and other infrastructure are repaired at the optimal time for efficiency and reliability. In this regard, SBB would need 8 billion francs to bring all its systems up to standard, 3 billion more than it would have cost in 2016.

Faced with this underinvestment, rail infrastructure manager Peter Kummer warned that Swiss railways face “conditions like in other countries”, specifically Germany. Transport Minister Albert Rösti (SVP) wrote back in May that "we see in our neighbouring country what happens when too little is invested in maintaining the infrastructure over decades." When debating the new funding package, lawmakers repeatedly raised fears that Swiss passengers will face “conditions like those in Germany.”

Delays and cancellations: What on Earth is happening at Deutsche Bahn?

The spectre of Deutsche Bahn is often used as both a cautionary tale and boogeyman when debating the health of the Swiss railways. A third of German long-distance trains were delayed in 2023, with DB having recently been ordered to improve its punctuality directly by the German government.

Much of the crisis at Deutsche Bahn has its source in decades of underinvestment and haphazard maintenance, with the company having to change its timetable between 2 and 3 million times this year due to signal failures, broken switches and safety-imposed speed limits. DB Netz AG head Philipp Nagl told reporters in August that a decade of renewal was required to get German railways back on track.

1.000 rail maintenance projects planned in Switzerland

To prevent this from happening in Swiss cities and cantons, SBB and other providers will use the extra money to conduct around 1.000 maintenance projects. What’s more, Transport Minister Rösti said he hopes to secure 10 billion francs more in funding for maintenance and expansion, in plans that will be submitted next year.

With the approval of the National and Federal Council, the spending proposal will now be sent to the Council of States for approval.

Thumb image credit: Michael Derrer Fuchs / Shutterstock.com