I rode from Geneva airport to Zurich airport - bottom left to top right of the country! A nice ride.

My meeting in the airport ended at 15:45: I caught a train at 16:05 and was in my hotel near the airport at 20:00. The journey would have taken much the same time by air, although a lot of it would have been spent in Geneva Airport waiting for the next flight! By contrast, the trains run every half hour.

The train made 11 stops. Station stop time was 35 minutes, of which 14 minutes were at Zurich Hbf where the train reversed. Apart from this, three stops each took 1 minute, two 2 minutes, two 3 minutes and one 6 minutes.

I didn't have the scheduled time at two of the stops, but apart from these we were on time at 5 stations, a minute late at 3 and a minute early at one.

A previous post commented on anomalies in the fares system on my commuter line to London.

A complaint was that the single fare is significantly more than half the return - penalising people who can't buy a return for one reason or another.

A new example of this is between St. Albans and West Hampstead, a major interchange point.

The return fare from St. Albans is £15. The single fare from St. Albans is £8.80 - 59% of the return. And the single from West Hampstead is £9.10, 61% of the return fare.

An explanation is being requested.

The Zurich S-Bahn has a nice format in its timetables, and one I have not seen before.

The network has 28 separate lines, each with a basic service running between 2 and 4 times an hour and calling at all stations.

The stations are listed in geographical order down the centre of the page, with the standard departure times each hour from each station in the columns on each side. The direction of the trains is indicated by arrows - one way on the left hand side of the page and the other way on the right hand side.

Going out from the centre of the page, the next columns show the first and last trains (with times at key points only).

Finally - the nice point - are columns with exceptions. These show additional peak-hour trains, trains with a different stopping patters, special late-night trains which run off-pattern and the like.

At the end of the timetable booklet are the night services - and to highlight that these ARE night services, the station names are in white on black rather than black on white as elsewhere in the timetable.

It conveys information without too much detail - I liked it!