Zurich Airport
Zürich Airport railway station is located underneath the "Airport Centre". The station has frequent Zürich S-Bahn services, plus direct InterRegio, InterCity, and Eurocity services, to many places including Basel, Bern, Biel/Bienne, Brig, Geneva, Konstanz, Lausanne, Lucerne, Munich, Romanshorn, St. Gallen, and Winterthur. There are some 13 trains per hour to Zürich Hauptbahnhof, Zürich's main city centre station, with a journey time of between 10 and 15 minutes. By changing trains at Hauptbahnhof, most other places in Switzerland can be reached in a few hours.
Zürich Underground Railway
In 1864, one year after the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London, the "Zürcherische Freitagszeitung" (Zürich Friday Journal) published the visionary idea of a partly underground steam railway that was to go from the main station, along the Fröschengraben and end at Lake Zürich. However, the moat was filled up and became the Bahnhofstrasse instead. At the beginning of the 1930s, the development of the Zürich tramway network was by and large completed and newly built districts became accessible by bus and trolleybus lines. City architect Herbert Steiner, who had developed the Zürich building and zoning regulations in 1948, predicted that 550,000 people would be living in the city. He deemed the disentanglement of traffic streams and the massive expansion of public transport essential in order to realize the ideal of a garden city. However, in his opinion the city was and would always be too small for an underground railway. Architect Armin Meili and geographer Hans Carol held similar views, but due to the imminent post-war economic boom (Golden Age of Capitalism) and mass motorization, their voices remained almost unheard.