Today, I took the long way from Zurich to St. Gallen, taking the train up to Schaffhausen and then following the S1 all the way along the Bodensee. It’s quite a nice route.
On the way back one of the stops was Aadorf, which I found quite funny as when talking about illustrative scenarios in the railway context (e.g. for interlockings, or generally the train operation procedures), we often use Adorf and Bstadt as examples. That A(a)dorf exists in real life is quite ironic.
Today I traveled a bit on the S-Bahn Zurich. Starting at Zurich HB, I first took the S6 to Uetikon, followed by the S7 to Rapperswil, completing the route along the Goldküste. After a short hop to Rüti ZH, I rode the S26 all the way to Winterthur, completing the first S-Bahn line around Zurich. It’s quite a nice route.
From Winterthur, the S24 brought me up to Thayngen, crossing off the northern most train station in Switzerland. Back in Schaffhausen, I then rode the S9 all the way to Uster, completing the second S-Bahn in Zurich and also completing my day of riding random trains around Zurich.
To keep track of the stations I have visited I am using an amazing site called viaduct. In addition, I have now created a spreadsheet to make some custom diagrams and statistics. You can find some diagrams here.
Luckily, the federal office of transport provides a list of all stations in Switzerland as well as a list of all lines in Switzerland. As I am mostly interested in train stations and lines, I have filtered them accordingly. I still keep track of the other stations and lines out of interest, but I don’t expect to make much progress on them.
After filtering, we are left with 1’738 train stations and 385 train lines. So I just have to visit 4.76 stations per day on average, in order to visit them all within a year.
For a train station to count I just need to have been on a train which stops at that station. For lines I distinguish between having traveled on a line and having „completed“ a line. For traveling I just need to ride a train running on the line at least one stop. To complete a line, I need to travel the whole line from start to finish, on a train designated with that line number. This doesn’t need to be in one go, this can be interrupted and completed with multiple journeys. Completing a line is mostly a side quest, but might still be fun to do.
The train stations and all the lines are also split into 11 different regions so I can keep track of my progress for each one individually.
The spreadsheet would allow me to also track bus and tram stations, but as there are 23’973 of them in Switzerland, I don’t think I’ll make much progress on them and I might not bother keeping track of all of them. We’ll see.
Today I started my project of visiting all stations in Switzerland by traveling from Rorschach to Zurich. Though because I took the IC 5 I am still missing all the smaller stations in between and will have to go again at a later date with the S-Bahn. But I wanted to immediately get started on the first day where my GA is valid :).
Visited stations: Rorschach, St. Gallen, Winterthur, Zürich Flughafen, Zürich HB.
Starting in August, I will have a GA travelcard for one year, which allows for free travel (I guess I have already paid for it…) in all of Switzerland (and Liechtenstein). To make the most out of this, my goal is to visit all stations in Switzerland.
I will use the following rules:
There are many interesting destinations reachable by bus, and I will definitely visit some of them, but including all bus stops would blow up the list too much.
I am looking forward to exploring Switzerland and getting to know some less known regions.