Indian Railways to collaborate with Swiss railway to learn their best practices: Minister

Davos: Indian Railways plans to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the Swiss railway to learn from some of their best practices and procedures including the hub and spoke model and tunnelling technology, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday.

In an interview with PTI here during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, the minister said there are many good things that can be learned and there are some conventional technologies also where we can learn by collaborating with Switzerland.

"I had a good meeting with senior officials and policymakers of Swiss railways and I also visited their control centre. They have a great experience in tunnelling technology and the world's longest 57-km Gotthard tunnel is here," he said.

Vaishnaw further said Switzerland has a good system of track technology, especially the structure of tracks they have is very interesting.

"The most important thing I saw is that their entire network is based on a hub and spoke design. For example, if Zurich is a hub, then several trains arrive at Zurich station at one particular time, so that people can easily change over to any other train and then after the changeover, several trains leave the station around the same time," he noted.

"In our system, the focus has always been to provide end-to-end connectivity, for example, from Bhagalpur to Bengaluru or from Kolkata to Chennai or Delhi. Here in Switzerland, I saw that their network is not about end-to-end planning, but is focused on the hub and spoke model.

"They have six hubs and all of them have many connecting spokes. Trains arrive together at all six hubs and depart together. Their focus is more on changeovers," he said.

There are some good things to learn and we are doing a memorandum of understanding with the Swiss railway so that things improve further in our own system.

The minister said Switzerland also has a very good interconnectivity between different modes of public transport.

"There are very good inter-connections between trains, buses, cablecars, metro etc. and passengers can use any mode of transport with a common card or ticket," he said.

Switzerland is known to have a dense railway network with over 5,200 km of tracks and almost the entire network is electrified, except for some parts that are used for tourism-focussed steam locomotives.