BLS connects

The business area of passenger mobility is centred around our railway network. We operate trains on the Bern and Central Switzerland S-Bahn networks – from Bern to Payerne or from Lucerne to Langenthal. Our speedier InterRegio and RegioExpress lines go from Bern to Olten, La Chaux-de-Fonds and Domodossola, for example. Our passenger trains require 670 train drivers – our biggest group of employees. We currently operate four workshops, at which we maintain and clean the trains – in Spiez, Oberburg, Givisiez and Bönigen. Every train visits a workshop once a week, so that our passengers can always travel reliably and in comfort.

In Emmental and Oberaargau, BLS operates a bus network spanning more than 200 kilometres and 18 routes from its regional centres in Burgdorf, Langnau and Huttwil. Most of our bus passengers are commuters. The bus operations are overseen by Busland AG and its 130 employees – the com pany has been a subsidiary of BLS since its foundation in 2006. Our head office is in Burgdorf, with other depots located in Langnau in Emmental, in Sumiswald and Huttwil. With the Ilfis Garage in Langnau, we also provide a service centre for commercial vehicles.

Since 1913, BLS has also offered navigation services. On Lake Thun and Lake Brienz in the Bernese Oberland, we continuously operate scheduled cruises from spring to autumn, with near-hourly departures during the summer. In the winter season, we operate a daily cruise on Lake Thun. During the festive period, we also use the paddle steamer Blümlisalp for the popular winter steamboat excursion. BLS Navigation is one of the biggest tourism operators in the Bernese Oberland. The 80 employees at BLS Navigation form the crew aboard the boats in summer. In winter, they don their mechanics’ overalls and work on maintaining the ships in the boatyard.

BLS is the largest Car Transport service provider in Switzerland. BLS already began attaching open freight wagons to passenger trains in 1926 and using these to transport cars from Kandersteg to Brig and Domodossola. Since 1960, we have been operating the Car Transport service through the Lötschberg Tunnel between Kandersteg and Goppenstein using purpose-built trains. Since 2017, we have also been in charge of the Car Transport service through the Simplon Tunnel between Brig and Iselle. On the weekends from Easter through to the autumn holidays, motorists can put up their feet along the entire route from the Bernese Oberland through to Northern Italy – on our direct car train from Kandersteg to Iselle.

Every year, BLS operates around 24,000 freight trains throughout Europe. The business area of freight operations is managed by the subsidiary company BLS Cargo Ltd, founded in 2001. Since 2019, the BLS Cargo family has included the Belgian freight operator Crossrail. We provide freight transport services by rail on the central north-south axis corridor from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. Within Switzerland, we provide domestic, import and export transport services. From Belgium onwards, we operate on additional routes.

In the business area of Infrastructure, BLS is responsible for a rail network spanning 420 kilometres. We build train stations, lay tracks and refurbish tunnels and bridges from Interlaken to Marin-Epagnier by Lake Neuchâtel and Zollbrück in Emmental. The centrepiece of our infrastructure is the Lötschberg axis. This includes the over-100-year-old mountain line from Frutigen to Brig, which is famous among railway enthusiasts the world over, as well as the 34.6-kilometre-long Lötschberg Base Tunnel, which was opened in 2007. Together with the Gotthard Base Tunnel, it forms the core of our New Rail Link through the Alps (NRLA) and plays a key role in the transport of freight between Rotterdam and Genoa.

Most points and signals are now remote-controlled rather than operated locally. This is why BLS owns several properties at its railway stations that are no longer required for operating the railway. Often centrally located, we want to develop new uses for these properties in the Property business area, which is why we founded the subsidiary company BLS Immobilien AG in 2017. We are considering the following train stations, for example: Burgdorf Steinhof, Biglen, Bern Europaplatz, Bümpliz Nord, Liebefeld and Spiez. Here we will be creating new residential and commercial properties with good public-transport connections over the next 10 to 15 years.