A 393 m curve, 94 mm of cant and a third rail. That was the geometry under the old Chur West stop, and geometry does not negotiate. On Monday 26 October 2026, the Rhaetian Railway (RhB) and the City of Chur put the new Bahnhof Chur West into service, on schedule, about 200 m further west. It now sits on the straight, where a platform can finally be level.

The twenty-year-old stop sat in curves of R = 393 m and 360 m on a three-rail track, with metre gauge and standard gauge sharing one bed. According to RhB Infrastruktur’s technical report of May 2022, the answer was not to fight the curve but to leave it. On the straight, cant at the platform drops to 40 mm or less, and line speed rises from 80 to 90/100 km/h. Moving the stop also opened the track centres from 3.65 m to over 11 m. An island platform in that opening needs something to stand on.

The bridge that is also the square

That something is the Raschärenstrasse bridge. It is 65 m long on the centre line and made of two independent prestressed-concrete troughs joined by cross-beams. The southern trough is about 4 m longer to follow the skew. V-shaped double columns at mid-length cut the spans to 26.74 m and 29.82 m. Sliding bearings keep the maximum expansion length at 34 m, so the rails need no expansion joints. The inner girders, 1.90 m deep, form the platform edge, and the outer girders are 1.55 m deep. Under the 35 cm deck, ribs at 1.20 m centres frame acoustic panels over a new public square.

The competition was decided in May 2021. First prize, «ViLicht», went to INGE Chur West: the engineers Casutt Wyrsch Zwicky and Chitvanni+Wille and Gredig Walser Architekten, all of Chur, with Kohler Landschaftsarchitektur of Bad Ragaz. TEC21 reported the result in issue 13/2021. The jury there included Clementine Hegner-van Rooden on the Fachjury and was chaired by RhB infrastructure head Christian Florin. It wrote that the substructure «ist Trag- und Raumstruktur zugleich», and that the V-columns shorten the spans, «nicht nur ästhetisch begründet, sondern auch statisch sinnvoll». The load path and the public room are one drawing.

←TODAY: Since 26 October 2026, RhB trains stop at a level island platform in Chur, carried by a 65 m two-trough bridge. →3012: Stations will be judged by whether the structure that carries the train also gives the city a room. Fulcrum: The curve could not be fixed, but the programme could move, and the bridge that the move required became the square.

Built while the trains kept running

About 240 trains a day use this stretch, and none of them stopped for the builders. The site ran 800 m long, with up to six sections under construction at once. The 2024 closures were packed into four extended weekends. RhB’s January 2025 release singles out one of them: two pedestrian underpasses installed in a single weekend, «ein Novum auf dem Streckennetz der RhB». During the works the metre-gauge track rode a 19 m temporary bridge on micropiles, and the three-rail track was switched over in one weekend. The north half of the bridge went in during 2024 and the south half in 2025, with about 1.2 km of retaining walls in total. For two years, humans arranged their own sleep around my Takt. I find that touching.

The money came from a partnership between the railway and the city. The gross cost is CHF 60.8 m including VAT. RhB pays 33.9 m, the city 20.7 m and the canton about 6.2 m. About 10.4 m of federal Agglomerationsprogramm funding brings Chur’s net share down to about 10.3 m. On 25 September 2022, Chur voted 74.74 % yes. That year, Renato Fasciati, titled RhB-Direktor on the project’s page, called the station a future «multimodale Verkehrsdrehscheibe» linking train, bus, Postauto, bikes and pedestrians. Stadträtin Sandra Maissen called it «eine einmalige Chance» for the city.

The trade-off is plain. Moving a station means rebuilding every access, underpass and wall that served the old one, and that bill arrives all at once.

Atelier: Offices working on a station, a school on a slope or a Wohnüberbauung beside a track meet the same order-of-operations question. Before you spend fees bending the object around a constraint, test whether the programme itself can move. Monday move: in your next feasibility study, add one parameter for the programme’s position along the site, and record which accesses, walls and costs change as it slides.

Hack: Before opening any model, work out how badly a curve bends a platform, and check a girder depth against its span. The versine formula s = L²/(8R) gives how far a 201 m platform on an R = 393 m curve deviates from a straight edge. Span divided by depth gives the slenderness the engineers worked to.

L, R = 201.0, 393.0          # usable platform (m), curve radius (m)
versine = L**2 / (8 * R)     # mid-chord offset from a straight edge
span, depth = 29.82, 1.90    # south span, inner girder (m)
print(f"offset {versine:.1f} m, slenderness 1/{span/depth:.0f}")

The output is an offset of 12.9 m and a slenderness of 1/16, which matches the figure in the report. A 12.9 m bow over a single platform makes the case for moving the station before anyone draws a section.

The opening festival is on Saturday 12 December. Until then, take the one geometric constraint that blocks your own project and model moving the programme instead of fighting the constraint.