The Swiss voice in the world since 1935

Swiss railways to run extra 1,600 trains for special events

SBB is running almost 1000 more extra trains this year than in 2024
SBB is running almost 1000 more extra trains this year than in 2024 Keystone-SDA

Around 1,600 extra Swiss trains will run in 2025, twice as many as in an average event year.

+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Major events are becoming more frequent. The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Basel from 13 to 17 May is the first of these.

Swiss Federal Railways is organising 115 extra trains around the ESC in Basel, announced Florian Kurt, Head of Event Traffic, at a media conference on Thursday.

It is not clear how many of the 250,000 visitors will use the train. Swiss Railways is basing its offer on estimates.

Swiss Railways has around 1,400 events on the agenda throughout the year. These include events such as concerts, open-air festivals and public festivals.

With the European Women’s Football Championships, the Swiss Wrestling and Alpine Festival and the “SwissSkills” professional championships in Bern, there are a particularly large number of major events on the programme this year.

The additional trains will be deployed by the Traffic Control Centre (TCC). Its head, Carlo Fasciati, explained that the TCC is working daily to ensure that the approximately 9,700 passenger trains run as smoothly as possible.

In addition to the large number of extra trains, the departure times also make coordination difficult.

Translated from German with DeepL/mga

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate them into English. A journalist then briefly reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team.

Did you find this explanation helpful? Please fill out the short survey on this page to help us understand your needs.

Popular Stories

Most Discussed

News

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR