Swiss Railways’ best first quarter in history. The smaller country has twice as much transport capacity as the Czech Republic

Major investments in rail capacity, acceleration and new vehicles have been reflected in new statistics on the use of rail transport in Switzerland.

In the first quarter of this year, the volume of so-called passenger kilometers (the number of passengers multiplied by the kilometers driven) rose by 4% year-on-year to 5.43 billion passenger kilometers. This follows from data from the organization Litra, which monitors the performance of Swiss transport.

The comparison with the Czech Republic is also interesting: according to last year’s data, the Czech Railways achieves similar transport performance in twice the time. Switzerland has two million fewer inhabitants than the Czech Republic. At the same time, the first quarter is always the weakest in terms of passenger numbers of the entire year.

The Swiss also set a new record in the number of train kilometers traveled. This indicator grew more slowly, which shows that trains are running fuller.

At the same time, even Switzerland did not escape the decline in freight transport by rail caused by the pan-European decline in freight transport. Freight trains recorded 2.91 billion net tonne kilometers in the quarter, a decrease of 3.6%. “The decline in rail freight transport is mainly due to the difficult economic environment in Europe. Compared to the same quarter last year, freight traffic across the Alps also decreased,” states Litra in its report.

During May, Deník Zdopravy.cz will publish several longer analytical texts about Swiss transport, which were created after interviews with representatives of the Ministry of Transport there and other organizations active in public transport.

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