What are the rules on when a connecting Train waits and when it doesn't?

NoahB

As far as I know generally IC doesn’t wait for Regio, and Regio doesn’t wait for S-Bahn. But I just traveled with this connection: https://a.sbbmobile.ch/s/fnZs5IQz and somehow the connecting Train didn’t wait the 2 minutes that it would’ve had to to guarantee the connection which I don’t understand since it’s a regio that should’ve waited for another Regio and resulted in Passengers beeing stranded in a unheated waiting room in chur for an hour at 10:30 in the evening… Also I would assume that the snowball effect of a train waiting at such a late hour is greatly reduced since there just aren’t as many conneting trains anymore.

(I’m just generally quite unsatisfied with the reliability of the connections between Zürich and the Engadin, of the last 4 times I did the jurney I arrived twice over one hour late which is DB performance, not what I expect from Switzerland! )

RolandP

Hello NoahB

Firstly, welcome to the SBB Community. This is a help page run by volunteer travel experts and experienced public transit users. This is not the SBB Customer Service.

We cannot see your connection as the link is no longer valid. You should make a screenshot of it and paste it here …

The train category is not the only argument for the decision whether a train will wait or not. It is rather the existence of possible later connections.

SBB was probably not aware that RhB is late and there are still passengers wanting the connection to Zurich? Next time simply ask the RhB train staff on board for assistance. They can ask for the connection.

Or contact RhB to let them know the connection is repeatedly unsatisfying:

railservice@rhb.ch

If you have arrived at your destination with a delay of 60+ minutes due to a misconnection, you can ask for a compensation.

Btw, welcome for the free advice 🙂

Kind regards,
Roland

Krist

When I still lived in Belgium the railways there published for each major station what the maximum waiting times were. For example, for the local that I needed to take in Gent the poster would say that It would wait for the IC from Brussels, and that to a maximum of 5 minutes, except for the last train of the day, which would wait as long as necessary to make sure everyone got home…
That was quite good services.

I am pretty sure that such rules exists here too, as I for example see that the R to Lauterbrunnen will wait a few minutes for a delayed IC in Interlaken, but not indefinitely. Making these rules available to the public might be a useful service.

Tafunge25

I think it would be somewhat limiting to the dispatchers as having published rules would mean that they have to stick to them for sure. Depending on what is happening on the routes, it may well be that a single delay will cause a lot of delays, and the ‘cost’ of having a train wait varies very much on a case-to-case basis. This particularly holds for single-track lines. It also is problematic at big stations because there, there are a lot of conflicts between the trains entering and leaving it.