Time Travel: A Digital Window into the History of Railroad Culture, A train ride as a journey through time: Use your smartphone and GPS to experience historical stories, images, and videos—perfectly synchronized with the passing landscape.
- Customer:
- Swiss Rail and Culture Association
- What:
- Concept Development, Project Development, Project Management
- Where:
- Switzerland
- When:
- Feb 2026 - Jan 2028
- Partners:
- State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO)
The project “Time Travel: A Digital Window into the History of Railway Culture” combines the fascination of travel with cutting-edge digital storytelling to create a holistic experience. During the train ride, the train window transforms into a living portal for passengers: they are presented with historical stories that are enhanced by the hardware and software on their own devices. Using GPS location data, historical photographs, videos, and eyewitness accounts are precisely displayed on their screens. This immersive experience significantly enhances the travel experience and offers people of all generations—whether locals or international guests—a profound, accessible, and playfully enriching journey of discovery that opens up a new dimension of movement through space and time.
Through the newly founded supporting association “Bahn und Kultur Schweiz,” transportation companies such as the Südostbahn (SOB), destinations such as St. Gallen-Lake Constance, Rapperswil-Lake Zurich, and Toggenburg Tourism, historians, archivists, and technology providers are closely intertwined. Under the strategic leadership and professional project management of gutundgut GmbH, and with technological implementation by Locomot GmbH, the needs of end users and data providers are directly incorporated into the project’s ongoing development.
Regional museums, archives, and the local community are actively involved in participatory workshops to digitally preserve their collective knowledge. This provides tourism organizations with an effective tool for intelligent visitor management that distributes visitor flows in a targeted manner, relieves pressure on sensitive areas, and strengthens year-round tourism beyond the climate-sensitive winter season.
A well-designed licensing and content collaboration model ensures the platform’s long-term economic viability without permanent reliance on public funding, while simultaneously increasing value creation for local service providers. Thanks to this standardized technical foundation, passengers enjoy an immersive, accessible travel experience directly on their devices, while the system also serves as a replicable blueprint for effortless expansion to other routes both domestically and internationally.