This made the well-preserved Baden station the oldest Swiss train station in Switzerland although the first station was in Basel, built in 1845 by the French Alsace Railway to serve the trains it already had running across the border into the Swiss city. A second foreign station, the Badischer Bahnhof, followed in 1855.
Baden’s station was planned in 1846, and built 1846-47 according to plans by Ferdinand Stadler. It was used to transport fresh rolls to market in Zürich and wealthy residents of Zürich to the elaborate baths of Baden at the crook of the Limmat River.
It’s said that one can get anywhere by train in Switzerland. That’s quite untrue. Switzerland has 3,600 incorporated communities but only 1,900 train stations. Yet, buses, ships, cable cars, and trams make Switzerland so accessible that half of all Swiss households live within a kilometer (0.6 miles) of a train station, and 97 percent of all Swiss households live within a kilometer of public transportation. Every Swiss makes 48 train trips a year and covers more than 1,780 km/1,100 mi on average over the 14,000 km/9,000 mi of train, boat, and postal bus routes comprising the Swiss Travel System. This high usage is due not only to ecological considerations but to the proximity of stations. It makes the Swiss the European leaders in train travel.
Keeping track of the Swiss train companies is like tabulating a can of alphabet soup. The Swiss Federal Railroads has nine initials--three initials for each of the three largest language groups: SBB (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen) for the German-speaking region, CFF (Chemins de Fer Federaux Suisses) for the French, FFS (Ferrovie Federali Svizzere) for the Italian, and Web sites for each, plus English. Nearly a hundred additional companies operating private railroad lines, funiculars, ships, and cable cars with their particular initials in one or more languages are combined into the integrated Swiss Travel System with dovetailed timetables and coordinated connections.
Zürich is the only city where you see so many different kinds of high-speed trains. French TGVs from Paris arrive in Basel, Lausanne, Geneva, and Zürich. High-speed GermanRail ICE trains run right into Zürich’s Hauptbahnhof. Cisalpino ETR 470 tilting trains connect with Milan. Tilting GermanRail ICE trains cruise between Zürich and Stuttgart, and two night trains, CityNightLine and EuroNight, serve Zürich.
SBB operates more than 700 train stations divided into three levels of service. The top, Zürich, Luzern, Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Bern, and Winterthur, have the title, “RailCity,” and encompass shops of every conceivable description, including chocolates and watches.
Zürich’s environmentally-friendly S-Bahn (rapid-transit) train system, which opened in May 1990, serves every village in canton Zürich and many places in the greater Zürich region in a reasonable time at hourly or half-hourly intervals. S-Bahn trains make getting to Zürich airport from anywhere in canton Zürich as easy as conceivable because one needn’t go through Zürich Hauptbahnhof.
Find out more about historic trains from the Swiss Federal Railway Heritage Foundation.
