The Forch railway (German: Forchbahn, FB or Förchler) is a local railway line in the Swiss canton of Zürich. It is owned and operated by the Forchbahn AG, and is branded as line S18 of the Zürich S-Bahn. The standard Zürcher Verkehrsverbund (ZVV) zonal fare tariffs apply to the line.
The line opened in 1912 and links the towns of Esslingen and Forch to Rehalp, an outer suburb of the city of Zürich. From Rehalp, trains continue over the Zürich tram system to a terminus outside Zürich Stadelhofen railway station in central Zürich.
The line is built to metre gauge (3 ft 3 3⁄8 in gauge). Between Esslingen and Rehalp the line has a length of some 13 km (8.1 mi), with the continuation over the Zürich tram system adding an extra 3 km (1.9 mi) of route.
The Forch railway line opened on November 27, 1912, with the trip taking 67 minutes. As built, the line from the Zürich city boundary to Esslingen was a single track tramway, largely mixed in with road traffic. At Esslingen, the Forch line connected with the Uster-Oetwil line and, indirectly via that, with the Wetzikon-Meilen line. These two metre gauge tramway lines had both closed by 1950.
S18, S-18 or S.18 may refer to:
S18 may refer to:
The ZVV (German abbreviation for Zürcher Verkehrsverbund, translated into English as Zürich Transport Network or Zürich Traffic Network) is a public transportation fare network system, combining virtually all kind of public transport means (rail, bus, tram, trolleybus, lake boat and cable car and the like) and services in the canton of Zürich (including Rapperswil-Jona and Pfäffikon SZ and some other spots), and integrating them into one single fare network and coordinated timetables. The fares are not based on particular lines and connections from A to B, but on the number of zones ones travels through for a specified period of time.
Established in May 1990, the ZVV was initially an elaborate web of railway lines. They were prefixed with the letter S (S-Bahn). S-Lines 1 through 43 (with some lines missing) now form part of the S-Bahn Network. A proof-of-payment fare system is in force on all S-Bahn trains; there are no fare gates, but those without a valid ticket face a minimum fine of CHF 100.