Mr Niklaus H König | President and Chief Executive Officer
SwissRapide AG | Switzerland

Niklaus H. Koenig, known as “Mr Maglev” in Switzerland, is the President and CEO of SwissRapide AG as well as Project Director of the SwissRapide Express project.

Born in Alberta, Canada, Niklaus Koenig studied Theatre Arts at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Electrical Engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and completed his Master’s Degree in Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.

His working experience includes Sony of Canada, Philips Switzerland and the Swiss Federal Office of Transport (BAV), where he was responsible for railway signalling, traffic management and telecommunication systems. In 1997, he joined the Swiss Federal Railways SBB in Zürich as Head of the
Signalling Department. In 1999 he founded the European Euro-Interlocking Project under the auspices of the International Union of Railways (UIC), which he led successfully as Senior Project Manager until 2005. In 2006, he became Director and CEO of Swiss Railway Engineering SRE GmbH in Zurich and in the same year, he founded the SwissRapide Express Maglev rail project. In 2008, he founded SwissRapide AG based in Zurich, a company dedicated to the promotion and management of the SwissRapide Express project as well as to the planning and engineering of Maglev high-speed rail projects worldwide.