There are 670 daily trains between Zurich and Winterthur, with 120 000 passengers using the route today. As every railway infrastructure has its bottlenecks, SBB has defined this line as one of the critical places needing improvement. A new project, MehrSpur Zürich–Winterthur, will cover several partial projects enabling smoother fluidity of passenger and freight trains on this line.
The project covers around nine-kilometre-long Brüttener Tunnel between Dietlikon / Bassersdorf and Winterthur. Four train stations - Dietlikon, Bassersdorf, Wallisellen, Winterthur Töss – will be expanded too. After adding two bridges and two short tunnels, new tracks will be connected to the existing railway network. As a result, traffic will be de-concentrated, and trains can cross each other without impeding oncoming traffic.
The new double-track line will bypass the current line via Effretikon through a newly built Bruttenertunnel. The infrastructure capacity will thus rise to 900 daily trains and 156,000 passengers. By 2035, two cities will be connected by two routes every quarter of an hour, saving 8 minutes of travel time on every train. The EUR 3 billion project is scheduled for completion in 2035.
