I caught a bus from Geneva every weekday for nearly a year and I swear one was never late by more than a minute. Really!

Yep I saw your posting and having spent a nice week in Luzern last year and tripped around on buses and trains, I came away with similar impressions to yours. To be honest I didn’t remember anything of your posting as I typed out mine but after a bit of digging, check this out - map of swiss railways:

http://www.alleuroperail.com/eurorailway-maps/switzerland-map.htm

And a map of ours:

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/tocs_maps/maps/network_rail_maps.htm

Right so compare and contrast - the swiss railway is evenly distributed with no substantial hubs. The British railway by contrast has one very large hub in the form of London. So to travel from London to anywhere is fairly direct, but travelling cross country intuitively will be harder. Meanwhile the Swiss system means many trains are not direct, you will have to change but it’s expected and thus well supported.

In conclusion, you’ve got central hub versus decentralized peer to peer and it would seem that there’s only one winner! There’s lots more to think about too like the fact that Swiss trains run pretty much in any weather whilst the British equivalent stumbles majorly over errrr leaves.