Cisalpino AG

Cisalpino AG was a railway company, referred to as CIS in timetables, operating international trains between Switzerland and Italy connecting Basel, Schaffhausen, Zürich, Geneva, Milan, Venice, Trieste, Livorno, and Florence. The company has its legal headquarters in Muri bei Bern, Switzerland, and is jointly owned by the Swiss Federal Railways and Trenitalia.

It was founded in 1993 to operate fast trains across the Alps using tilting trains. In 2005, however, it also took over all daytime long-distance passenger trains between Switzerland and Italy run with conventional, non-tilting trains.

In the fall of 2009, the project was abandoned because of mounting bad press over the quality of service and the fiasco surrounding orders placed for new trains. The remaining trains were split nearly evenly between the two owners.

Till December 2012 the company owned the ETR 610 trainsets and leased them to Trenitalia and the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS). The company still exists, but its name is no longer used for public purposes.

The original service was branded under the name "Cisalpino," using the abbreviation "CIS" in timetables, but it has now been replaced by the name EuroCity, using the abbreviation "EC". It operated with nine Italian ETR 470 tilting trains (colloquially known as "Pendolino").

During the 2009 timetable these trains were used on two main routes to connect Milan with northern Switzerland. Four trains per day and per direction ran via the Lötschberg line to Bern and Basel. Zurich was connected via the Gotthardbahn with seven daily trains, of which three were direct, and four others required a change in Lugano on to a leased Swiss ICN train. One of the Zurich-bound trains originally ran as far north as Stuttgart, but was cut back to Schaffhausen in 2006.

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