Davos: Indian Railways plans to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the Swiss railway to learn from some of their best practices and procedures including the hub and spoke model and tunnelling technology, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday. In an interview with PTI here during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, the minister said there are many good things that can be learned and there are some conventional technologies also where we can learn by collaborating with Switzerland.
"I had a good meeting with senior officials and policy makers of Swiss railways and I also visited their control centre. They have a great experience in tunnelling technology and the world's longest 57-km Gotthard tunnel is here," he said. Vaishnaw further said Switzerland has a good system of track technology, especially the structure of tracks they have is very interesting.
"The most important thing I saw is that their entire network is based on a hub and spoke design. For example, if Zurich is a hub, then several trains arrive at Zurich station at one particular time, so that people can easily change over to any other train and then after the changeover, several trains leave the station around the same time," he noted. "In our system, the focus has always been to provide end-to-end connectivity, for example, from Bhagalpur to Bengaluru or from Kolkata to Chennai or Delhi. Here in Switzerland, I saw that their network is not about end-to-end planning, but its focussed on hub and spoke model.