Large Scale Central

Zürich's Central Station

Prototypes
#1

Thursday SWMBO returned from Switzerland. Amongst the “goodies” was a very interesting Special Edition LOKI magazine about Zürich’s Central Station from the original version back in 1847 to today’s version that presently handles up to 2915 trains in a 24 hour period — which will increase to more than 3000 after the latest additions come on-line before our Swiss trip in 2015.
130 pages that made my eyes pop and my head spin, especially the tunneling efforts and multi-layered track/platform layout within the station. Add to that the new bridges to enable the traffic flow with as short as two minute intervals.
It will be true culture shock to see this next summer up close and in reality. BTW in order to expand the rail capacity to this extent they also had to add/modify the road network.

High time to press Google Earth into action to find out how much is accessible to pedestrian traffic i.e. rail fanning.
PS those are 3000 passenger trains, freight by-passes all the “good stuff”.

#2

HJ, If I do the math correctly that means a train every 30 seconds or so on average.

#3

Busy place.

#4

It certainly is.
Location is 47°23’08.82" N 8°31’24.42" E on Google Earth. That shows a lot of the trackage on the surface, but as mentioned there is a lot on the lower layers.

If you zoom in you’ll see all the crossovers to give access to all the tracks, dozens of double-slip switches and turnouts.
The computer control of that is a whole different story, the basic background function comes from the 24 hour schedule which stores each routing through the maze for each and every train. So far I have no idea how they compensate when the inevitable delays happen.

#5

Nice looking magazine.

Does anyone import those to the states as a dealer? 10+ € for shipping make it/them a no go.

#6

Don,

I’d have to ask the publishers if they do, but I suspect most of the stuff goes to private subscribers. It was interesting that SWMBO found the ad for the special issue in one of the copies my buddy in Kelowna shares with me.
In turn he gets to read one of the mags I subscribe to.