SBB chief puts track maintenance before expansion projects

SBB chief executive Vincent Ducrot says maintaining Switzerland’s rail infrastructure must come before expansion projects. In an interview with SRF, he said the railway faces heavy strain from record passenger numbers, around 10,000 trains a day and millions of cyberattacks each year.

The Swiss Federal Railways, known as SBB, uses automated systems, radar and satellite imagery to monitor its tracks, Ducrot said. Train drivers also play a crucial role by regularly travelling the network and reporting problems such as heat-related track deformations.

SBB records several million cyberattacks annually, he said. The company has teams monitoring suspicious activity around the clock, and has tripled the size of those teams over the past decade.

Passenger rail travel reached a record level in 2025. Ducrot said the growth was welcome but required the rail system to expand continuously. SBB monitors standing-room capacity, but trains cannot be made longer than 400 metres, and trains in urban areas are often limited to 300 metres. Demand is also increasingly driven by leisure travel, he said, such as journeys to Ticino in good weather.

SBB has a maintenance backlog of more than 9 billion Swiss francs. Ducrot said the system was not yet at the point reached in Germany, where insufficient investment had severely affected the network, but more work was needed, particularly on the tracks.

The company renews about 200 kilometres of track each year but needs to increase that figure to 230 kilometres, he said. “Maintenance is the foundation,” Ducrot said. “The first priority is maintenance, and only then comes an expansion horizon.”

He said SBB’s priorities were track maintenance first, followed by the 2035 expansion horizon and digitalisation. Large-scale projects with the greatest benefits should come fourth, he said.

Ducrot said he was not surprised by criticism from Switzerland’s Federal Audit Office that the proposed “Transport 2045” programme was poorly prepared and could become more expensive. The project is currently in a consultation process, he said, adding that cantons were seeking more investment while the audit office was warning about costs.

Asked about the disputed Grimsel tunnel, Ducrot said Swiss law also required the development of tourist regions. Such projects had a regional character and were important to the regions concerned, he said. He acknowledged that he would organise some things differently, but said the Swiss public had accepted the system and that SBB worked well within it.

Ducrot, who is due to retire soon, said his main message to his successor would be that employees were the company’s most important asset. SBB staff performed an exceptional feat every day by ensuring that so many trains ran on time, he said.