"Der Kluge reist im Zuge," was a famous slogan of the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) - or, as it might be put in English: "Those with brain take the train."

Millions of people in Switzerland show every year what good brains they have, but how many think of trains as anything more than a convenient and stressfree way to get from A to B, speeding past traffic jams, admiring the countryside, reading the newspaper, getting on with paperwork...?

And yet in the course of the last 150 years the railway has helped make Switzerland what it is today.

It boosted the 19th century economy. Industrialists could import and export as never before. Because Switzerland lacks raw materials, they concentrated on the specialised, high-quality products typical of Swiss industry even today. Tourists came flocking to enjoy the mountains. Speedy transport meant that not only the wealthy leisured classes could visit, but also the far more numerous middle-classes who had limited holiday time and could not afford to spend weeks on the way. As trains brought cheap cereal from abroad, farmers switched to dairy agriculture - more profitable and less labour intensive.

It changed the way Swiss people lived and where they lived. They became more mobile. In the first 50 years of the railways, the number of journeys taken went up 100-fold. Redundant farm workers abandoned the countryside and flocked to the cities to become the workforce for the new industries.

It altered the landscape, and not only with the construction of tracks, bridges and tunnels, or the change in agricultural land use. The hillsides changed too: trees were at last replanted after decades of unrestricted felling, once it became clear that landslides and flooding from the bare hills were destroying railway tracks.

The impact of the railways is not only historical. They are shaping the Switzerland of tomorrow as well.