Swiss-Hungarian Rail Timetable Comparison: At First Glance
The picture on the left (click for large versions) is Lausanne Main Station in Switzerland, with the Swiss Alps in the background. I have spent half a year here as an exchange student and sometimes I feel like going back again to study, windsurf, ski, and, as you might have guessed, to take a train to the alps to go cycling.
The picture on the right, however, is the Budapest Déli railway station, from where I live now.
At first sight, it feels great to see such similarity in two places where I love to live, but I can’t ignore the striking difference in the quality of the rail infrastructure. I wish it wasn’t a good metaphor for the “State of the Nation” too.
Can you guess now, how many pages long the Swiss rail timetable book is for the new season just started? One last help is that the Hungarian timetable book is 815 pages long, and as such a heavy product, is only scarcely available, as described here (in Hungarian).
Well, as you can see from the picture, the swiss timetable is a stunning 1 page, which is some 99.98% less.
from sma-partner.ch, click here for large version (PDF)
I am exaggerating, yes; of course it is also available in book-like formats, and it is in fact an A3 page (so be it 8 regular pages), and there are a couple of exceptions for which you have to refer to a slightly longer document.
Switzerland, of course, has a denser network and more frequent departures than Hungary and most other countries in the World. The reason it is still possible to describe all national departure times on one single network map is because virtually all trains follow a repetitive schedule of 60 or sometime 120 minutes. This is called Integraler Taktfahrplan (ITF) and the non-integrated (i.e. with bus services) version were even tested on some lines of Hungary until December 2008.
Did I mention that less is more?
ITF is not only easy to map and hence easy to remember, but its additional cost over traditional timetables is surprisingly small, due to its high efficiency. But more on that later, now please just have a look at the Swiss map (PDF) and enjoy.
