Rail 2000 is the name of the programme designed to provide faster and more frequent services to meet the needs of travellers in the 21st century. It is part of a general series of plans to encourage a movement of transport from road to rail.

It was approved by voters in 1987, but the timetable turned out to be over-optimistic for such a huge undertaking. Implementation was slowed down by the need to take varying local and regional wishes and interests into account, and also by the imposition of further environmental protection requirements. This is why, despite the name, the first stage of the project did not come into use until December 2004.

It might seem at first glance that doubling the service is a simple matter of merely doubling the number of trains. Nothing could be further from the truth! Rail 2000 is a complex project which involves an ambitious rail construction programme and the introduction of state-of-the-art technology on and off the track.

New lines

Running trains according to a systematised timetable with smooth connections means having a system of hubs - known familiarly as spiders - where the trains can converge and in effect exchange passengers. Rail 2000 has increased the number of "spiders", to ensure that none is more than an hour away from any other.

In some cases this has meant building new lines to shorten the distance. For example, under the old system Bern and Zurich were 69 minutes apart; to bring this down to 56 the SBB built down 45 km (28 miles) of new track from Mattstetten, just north of Bern to Rothrist, south of Olten. This was the biggest of some 100 construction sites needed to implement the Rail 2000 project.

Building new lines was necessary not only to bring the hubs closer together, but also because local trains - an important part of the SBB's services – used to share the main lines. They limited the number of fast trains it was possible to run, since they blocked the track as they made their more leisurely journeys and stopped at intermediate stations.

New rolling stock

Even more important than new lines was new technology. Specifically, this meant both new rolling stock able to take more passengers at greater speed, and new signalling systems that can cope with trains running at 200 kph.

Upping passenger capacity had already been achieved by the introduction of the double-decker carriages which have been a familiar sight on many of the main lines of the SBB network for several years now. The SBB has also brought in tilting trains which can travel faster on bends than traditional ones. These are being used in particular in the Jura foothills, between Basel and Geneva.

New technology

For trains travelling at over 160 kph, the traditional system of track-side signalling is unusable. It is being replaced with cab signalling, where drivers receive information by digital wireless transmission to a display device in their cabs. Information and instructions come from a line control centre which monitors all the trains in its sector and tell the driver what to do. This enhanced degree of control over the trains on any one stretch makes it possible - and safe - to cut times between them, even those running at high speed, and thus to run more of them.

Cab signalling enabling trains to travel at up to 200 kph came into use on the Mattstetten-Rothrist line in summer 2006. Initially only a small number of trains ran at full speed, but it is planned to do away with the 160 kph limit on this stretch by the end of 2007.

The cab signalling system is part of the standard European Train Control System - ETCS, in which Switzerland has been one of the pioneers. The benefit is obvious: locomotives will be able to ignore borders once they are all using a standardised system.

The Lötschberg base tunnel – part of the new transalpine railway link, NEAT - was equipped with the system from the time it opened in 2007.

A more limited version of ETCS, which employs traditional signalling at key junctions and keeps 160 kph as the maximum speed, should be in use throughout the country by the end of 2015. The higher level version will be used on the rail corridor through Switzerland linking Italy and Germany.