The railway question, 1836–1852

A late start and the Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn

Switzerland came late to the railway age. Business circles in Zurich and Basel discussed projects to link the two cities, and thereby the Rhine and the emerging networks of France and Germany, from the 1830s onwards. Disputes over routes, cantonal rivalries and the political crisis that culminated in the Sonderbund War of 1847 delayed every plan. When the Alsatian line from Strasbourg reached Basel in 1844, there was still no railway on Swiss territory.¹ The first Swiss company to build a line was the Schweizerische Nordbahn, established at the end of 1845 by Zurich and Basel merchants under the leadership of the Zurich industrialist Martin Escher-Hess, with the Austrian engineer Alois Negrelli as chief engineer.²

The Nordbahn intended to reach Basel, but the refusal of the cantons along the route stopped the line at Baden in Aargau. The 23-kilometre section from Zurich to Baden was inaugurated on 7 August 1847, three months before the outbreak of the Sonderbund War. Popular memory named it the Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn after a buttery pastry from Baden that Zurich households could now have delivered fresh, a nickname that captures both the novelty of speed and the modest commercial horizon of the first line. Four locomotives, named Limmat, Aare, Rhein and Reuss, covered the distance in about 45 minutes. The Nordbahn remained a commercial disappointment for years. Traffic was lower than expected, a daily service was withdrawn and planned branches were abandoned, so that the company entered the 1850s as a weak enterprise with a short line and an uncertain future.³ Its experience taught Zurich investors a lesson that shaped the next decade: a railway confined to a single cantonal corridor could not pay, and only an integrated network could generate the traffic needed to service its capital.

The Federal State and the expert reports of 1850

The Federal Constitution of 1848 gave the Confederation power to build public works in the national interest or to support them. It thereby opened the question of who should plan, own and finance a Swiss railway network (see Chapter C.IV). On 14 December 1849 the Federal Assembly decided to commission independent experts. On 7 June 1850 the Federal Council instructed two English engineers, Robert Stephenson, son of the pioneer George Stephenson, and his junior partner Henry Swinburne, to propose a suitable railway network for Switzerland, taking into account profitability, domestic and transit traffic, national defence and the question of an Alpine crossing.⁴ The report was signed at Geneva on 12 October 1850 and published in the Bundesblatt of the same year.

The Stephenson plan proposed a network of about 650 kilometres, whose cost it estimated at between 102 and 114 million francs depending on whether single or double track was laid. The historical verdict on their work is generous: by 1860 the network actually built corresponded broadly to the design they had drawn up, although it was built by competing private companies and not by a single public authority.⁵

The engineering report was accompanied by financial reports, which addressed the harder question of how the network was to be paid for. Two of the experts disagreed fundamentally. The Basel merchant Karl Geigy favoured construction by the state, while the Winterthur geographer and industrialist Jakob Melchior Ziegler argued for private construction. Röll’s summary adds that the economic experts saw state participation, whether by subsidy or by direct construction, as necessary if the network was to be completed within a reasonable period, because private competition alone could not raise the capital.⁶ Basel’s business leaders feared a disorderly race for finance in which rival private projects would exhaust the capital market and drive up the cost of borrowing for everyone. Events after 1852 largely proved them right.

State or private construction: the parliamentary battle

The Federal Council, and within it above all the Bernese radical Jakob Stämpfli, favoured a state railway. Stämpfli had modernised the finances of his canton as finance director and wanted to use the new federal state to create a unified economic area with efficient public administration.⁷ The arguments for state construction were considerable. A single public owner could plan the network rationally, avoid wasteful duplication, set uniform tariffs and raise capital at the lower interest rates available to a sovereign borrower.

Escher led the opposing camp. As early as 1849 he had supported the minority position that preferred private to state construction. His reasons were partly principled and partly political. A liberal of his kind distrusted a federal administration that did not yet exist in any serious form. He also doubted whether the young Confederation could raise the capital required without heavy taxation or dependence on foreign lenders. Politically, he recognised that no federal plan could satisfy all the cantons whose support was needed, since each wanted the line through its own towns. The decisive factors, according to a modern summary, were the disillusionment with federal centralisation that followed 1848, particularly in western Switzerland, and the impossibility of a federal plan that accommodated all cantonal interests.⁸

On 8 July 1852 the National Council took the decision of principle in favour of private construction. The majority was clear: 69 members voted for construction and operation by private companies and 22 for construction and operation by the Confederation. The victory belonged to Escher and to the economic liberals of Zurich. It also shifted the centre of gravity of Swiss railway construction towards Zurich, whose political and business elite was best placed to organise private capital on a large scale. A historian writing for the Swiss National Museum puts the result succinctly: Escher had ensured that railway building became a matter for private enterprise and not for the state.⁹

The Railway Act of 28 July 1852

The Federal Act on the construction and operation of railways in the territory of the Confederation, adopted on 28 July 1852, left the construction and operation of railways and the power to grant concessions to the cantons. The federal role was essentially one of approval and supervision. A cantonal concession required federal approval, which was to be refused only if the line harmed the military interests of the Confederation. The Act granted all railways the right of expropriation, obliged them to carry the post and to allow telegraph lines along their tracks, required military transport at reduced rates and empowered the Confederation to enforce a measure of technical uniformity.¹⁰

One provision of the 1852 regime deserves the lawyer’s particular attention, because it was to decide the fate of the private railways half a century later. The concessions reserved to the Confederation a right to purchase the lines at fixed intervals, namely after 30, 45, 60, 75, 90 and 99 years, on terms to be calculated from the companies’ earnings.¹¹ The purchase right was the legal seed of nationalisation. Private ownership was thus, from the start, a conditional and time-limited form of ownership. The public interest in the network could be reasserted at any of the fixed dates by buying out the shareholders at a price determined by law. When the question of nationalisation came to a head in the 1880s and 1890s, it turned almost entirely on the interpretation of these clauses and on the accounting figures from which the purchase price was to be derived.

The Act also had consequences that its authors did not intend. Because the federal authorities could refuse approval only on military grounds, they had no instrument to prevent parallel lines, to coordinate timetables or to impose tariff policy. Competing companies built duplicate routes, passengers faced unconnected timetables and ticketing was cumbersome.¹² For the capital market, the Act created a new asset class almost overnight. Each concession needed a company, each company needed share capital and bonds, each issue required banks and brokers capable of placing securities with investors. The Railway Act of 1852 is therefore, in a real sense, one of the founding documents of the Zurich financial centre.

The first boom

The effect of the Act was immediate. Within a few months of its adoption, promoters in Basel, Zurich, Lucerne, Bern and western Switzerland had formed companies, applied for concessions and begun to raise capital. The Schweizerische Centralbahn, promoted by Johann Jakob Speiser, Achilles Bischoff and Karl Geigy, was established in Basel in February 1853 with a plan to issue 36 million francs in shares and 12 million in bonds. While the Compagnie de l’Ouest Suisse opened its first line between Yverdon and Morges in the west, several companies in eastern Switzerland were merged in 1857 into the Vereinigte Schweizerbahnen. By 1859 the network already exceeded 1,000 kilometres, with a continuous line from Lake Constance to Geneva. The official Swiss presence abroad goes further and claims that by 1860, eight years after the decision of 1852, Switzerland had the densest railway network in Europe. The leading entrepreneurs of the period were few: Escher in Zurich, Speiser in Basel and Kasimir Friedrich Knörr in Lucerne are named by the HLS as the key figures of the construction period.¹³

Notes

1. HLS, Hans-Peter Bärtschi and Anne-Marie Dubler, “Eisenbahnen”, version of 11 February 2015, section “Die Anfänge”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007961/2015-02-11/. The HLS notes that Switzerland adopted the standard gauge of 1.435 metres that became the European norm. ↩
2. Wikipedia (en), “Swiss Northern Railway”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Northern_Railway. The article dates the founding committee to May 1845 and the start of construction to the spring of 1846. Martin Escher-Hess later corresponded with Alfred Escher on railway matters; the Alfred Escher Briefedition lists, for instance, a letter of 14 July 1852 (B1045), which could be identified. ↩
3. Wikipedia (de), “Geschichte der Schweizer Eisenbahn”, section on the Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_Schweizer_Eisenbahn; Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, sozialgeschichte.ch, “Verkehr – Von der Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn bis zur Gründung der SBB”, https://www.sozialgeschichte.ch/themen/von-der-spanisch-broetli-bahn-bis-zur-gruendung-der-sbb/; Wikipedia (en), “Swiss Northern Railway” (cited above), section on operations. ↩
4. Bruno Meyer, “Wer war Mr. Swinburne?”, Erste Ingenieure in der Schweiz – ein biographisches Verzeichnis, 13 June 2019, https://www.erste-ingenieure.ch/wer-war-mr-swinburne/. Swinburne had been junior partner in Stephenson’s Westminster office since 1843 and had supervised works on the Chester and Holyhead Railway. ↩
5. Victor von Röll (ed.), Enzyklopädie des Eisenbahnwesens, 2nd edn (1912–1923), “Schweizerische Eisenbahnen”, online at http://www.zeno.org/Roell-1912/A/Schweizerische+Eisenbahnen. The encyclopaedia summarises both the engineers’ report and the financial reports and gives the network length as approximately 650.5 km; HLS, “Eisenbahnen” (cited above), section “Eisenbahngesetz 1852”. ↩
6. Paul Huber, “Basel und die Eisenbahn – Staatsbau oder Privatbau?”, Trafina Privatbank, 1 April 2025, https://www.trafina.ch/aktuell/basel-und-die-eisenbahn-%E2%80%93-staatsbau-oder-privatbau. The author also records the view of Basel’s leading railway promoters that railways, like roads, were a natural monopoly and should be a public task; Röll, “Schweizerische Eisenbahnen” (cited above), section on the preparatory work of 1850. ↩
7. HLS, Stephanie Summermatter, “Stämpfli, Jakob”, version of 15 April 2020, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/004635/. The HLS records that, as a Federal Councillor from December 1854, he championed railway construction by the state and that he later presided over the newly founded Eidgenössische Bank from 1864 to 1877. ↩
8. Röll, “Escher” (cited above); Wikipedia (de), “Geschichte der Schweizer Eisenbahn” (cited above), section “Eisenbahngesetz von 1852”. ↩
9. Huber, “Basel und die Eisenbahn” (cited above); Wikipedia (de), “Geschichte der Schweizer Eisenbahn” (cited above), which gives the figures 69 to 22 for the National Council; Benedikt Meyer, “Alfred Escher und die Züge für Zürich”, Blog of the Swiss National Museum, 9 September 2019 (updated 17 December 2025), https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2019/09/escher-und-die-zuege-fuer-zuerich/. ↩
10. HLS, “Eisenbahnen” (cited above), section “Eisenbahngesetz 1852”. The HLS adds that finance came from private capital supplemented by contributions from benefiting communes and cantons, which forced the companies into profit-oriented planning; Röll, “Schweizerische Eisenbahnen” (cited above), section on the law of 28 July 1852. ↩
11. Röll, “Schweizerische Eisenbahnen” (cited above). Röll lists the buy-back dates and treats them as a characteristic feature of the concessions granted under the 1852 Act. ↩
12. sozialgeschichte.ch, “Verkehr – Von der Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn bis zur Gründung der SBB” (cited above), section on the Railway Act and competition between the companies. ↩
13. Wikipedia (en), “Swiss Central Railway”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Central_Railway; Wikipedia (de), “Geschichte der Schweizer Eisenbahn” (cited above), section on the major private companies 1852–1878; Presence Switzerland, “Weltmeisterin im Zugfahren – die Entstehungsgeschichte der Bahnnation Schweiz”, aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch, https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/de/weltmeisterin-im-zugfahren-die-entstehungsgeschichte-der-bahnnation-schweiz. The claim concerns network density and should be read with that qualification; HLS, “Eisenbahnen” (cited above), section “Die Bauperiode 1850–1870”. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.