Then a disembodied voice booms out. “We regret to announce that the Virgin train service to Birmingham is running approximately 70 — that’s seven zero — minutes late.”

Peter Grossenbacher is not given to displays of large emotion. He is, after all, Swiss. But when he hears this gloomy news his moustache twitches, his right eyebrow rises a full centimetre above its normal platform, and he gives a slight but tragic shake of his head. “That’s . . . very sad,” he mutters.

To Grossenbacher, a delayed train is like a dagger in the ribs. He feels the pain. The son of an engine driver, he eats, drinks and sleeps railways. On his last trip to England he lived in a railway station and had a trip on Thomas the Tank Engine. “With my eight-year-old son,” he explains hastily.

But running trains is also his job. For the past 20 years he has masterminded the expansion and timetabling of Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). That is the railwayman’s equivalent of managing Real Madrid or conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. By the common consent of passengers and transport professionals alike, SBB is the closest thing on this planet to poetry in locomotion.

Some 81 per cent of its trains arrive within 60 seconds of their scheduled time. Virtually all the others arrive within four minutes. Its carriages are clean; its staff speak perfect English (and French and German and Italian). It is loved by the Swiss themselves, who make more rail journeys per head than any other nationality except the Japanese. And, even when chugging up the Alps in midwinter, its trains never seem to be delayed by the “wrong kind of snow”.

All this is Grossenbacher’s pride and joy. But now the Swiss railway maestro finds himself stuck on a platform at Crewe, bang in the middle of a very different sort of railway network. One that notches up 35,000 signal failures and 15 million minutes of delayed trains each year. No wonder his moustache is twitching.

And it is my fault. I invited him to travel up and down England by train with me. Why? Because our railways are not universally admired, and I want to know why we get it so wrong when the Swiss get it so right.

Such a diagnosis is urgently needed, for this summer has been a shocker on the rails. First came the dismal spectacle of a train company, Connex, being stripped of its franchise, mainly for aggravating South-East England twice daily. Then came the “wrong kind of sunshine” episode, with passengers on one train smashing windows for ventilation after being trapped for nine sweltering hours on a 70-mile journey. This was followed by days of disruption on the East Coast line after the farcical Kings Cross derailment. That, it seems, was caused by the world’s first known attempt to run a railway without rails. Then rail customers were astonished to learn that the Rail Regulator, Tom Winsor, thinks too much public money is being invested in maintaining and improving Britain's crumbling train-set. His decision to curb budgets almost certainly means that fares will soar and expectations plummet. To pile gloom on gloom, 400 timetabled departures a week were axed across the country from last Monday — to “improve services and ease congestion”.

So can the backroom genius of Swiss Rail explain how we came so badly off our rails? Our first journey together is from London to Manchester on one of Sir Richard Branson’s deeply loved Virgin Trains. But we are still standing on the concourse at Euston when Grossenbacher makes his first, damning observation. He is staring at the electronic timetable in amazement. “But some of these trains are supposed to leave in ten minutes,” he cries in consternation.

“So?” I say.

“They don’t yet have any platform numbers!” he gasps.

“That’s normal,” I reply. “Soon you will see a platform number come up. Then you will see several hundred people sprint towards the platform gate before it closes. It’s a British railway tradition. It provides amusement for station staff and keeps the passengers fit.” Grossenbacher sighs, and utters the words that will toll glumly throughout our two days together: “Such a thing would never happen in Switzerland.” Why not? “Because we operate a clockface timetable. Every train to any particular destination leaves from the same platform at exactly the same minutes past the hour, every hour, every day, every week.”