Matisa Brand Guidelines: The Crissier Tamper Maker Founded in 1945

A chemical engineer, a technician and a tamping machine.

Matisa was founded in 1945 at Renens, just west of Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, by Constantin Sfezzo and August Ritz. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HLS), in entries by Albert Hahling published in 2009 and 2010, gives both men as founders and says the firm later moved to Crissier, where it still has its works.

The two came from different trades. Sfezzo, the HLS says, had studied chemical engineering at the University of Lausanne and held senior posts in Brazil and in France before working in Renens from 1943. Ritz served a metalworker’s apprenticeship in Herisau, studied at the technical college in Burgdorf and worked as a technician at Sapal in Lausanne; in 1934 he took over the firm Scheuchzer SA. Matisa itself credits its first machines to an invention by the Lausanne engineer Auguste Scheuchzer.

The HLS describes Matisa as the first company in the world to produce machines for the maintenance of railway track, and says it sold its machines for track maintenance and new track worldwide. The company calls itself “the pioneer of track maintenance work mechanisation.” English Wikipedia places the start in the 1940s, when the future founders built a prototype tamping machine to firm up the ballast under the sleepers with less manual work; Matisa was set up in 1945 to produce it in series.

From a ten-tonne tamper to renewal trains.

Tamping machines remain part of the range. English Wikipedia notes that the first Matisa tamper weighed under ten tonnes, while machines built some 70 years later weigh more than 100 tonnes. The company today sells plain-line tampers and universal tampers — the second type, it says, is built in particular for switches and crossings — and it describes the B 66 UC-D as a universal, double-head, continuous-action tamping machine for normal and high-speed lines, built around a tamping shuttle on two bogies. A continuous double-headed universal machine has been on the market since 2019, Matisa says.

Over the decades the range widened to ballast cleaners, ballast regulators, track construction trains, track inspection vehicles and transport wagons for switches, as English Wikipedia and the company’s product pages both list. Its track renewal trains are its largest machines: the company names the P 95 and the P 95 T, a version with an excavation system that removes surplus ballast so the new track can be laid at the height of the old, and says it has delivered more than 70 renewal trains around the world.

Software now sits alongside the steel. Matisa groups its guidance and on-board systems under the name METeor, and offers a cloud connection called COMET for monitoring machines and reading production reports. English Wikipedia records that by the late 2010s the company was researching wider use of electronics and automation.

Its customers, English Wikipedia says, have included London Underground, Network Rail, VolkerRail, Colas Rail, South Australian Railways and the Korean State Railway. Since around the turn of the century Matisa has also worked with Speno International, the rail-grinding specialist, which first ordered a new generation of grinding machines built by Matisa; the two have since shared suppliers and divided work on new machines between them, the same article says.

Track machines and documentation.

Rail vehicle and track-machine makers sell to a small circle of buyers: national railways, regional transport authorities, metro operators and the contractors who build and maintain track. Their brands are seen less in advertising than on the vehicles themselves, in tender documents and on the stands of the trade fairs where the industry meets.

The pictures these companies choose tend to repeat. A new train is rolled out of a works hall for its handover, often with the customer’s livery already applied and the maker’s name in smaller lettering on the cab. Track-machine makers favour a different scene: tampers, ballast cleaners and rail grinders, often painted yellow, working at night under floodlights while the line is closed to traffic. Suppliers of components show bogies, brake units and couplings on test stands, photographed close up in clean factory light.

Trade fairs give these brands their largest public stage. InnoTrans in Berlin is one such stage: Polish Wikipedia records Newag showing new vehicles there in even-numbered years since 2012, and English Wikipedia says Hyundai Rotem displayed its hydrogen fuel-cell tram there in 2022 and 2024. National fairs such as Trako in Poland fill the years in between.

Some of these firms are old, and several grew out of railway workshops, engineering works or family companies founded long before the brands they carry today. This guide sets out what can be checked about each one — who founded it, who owns it now, what it makes and where — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Made at Crissier, serviced worldwide.

Matisa has kept its manufacturing in Switzerland. English Wikipedia says the company has chosen to retain its main manufacturing base there despite deindustrialisation and a shortage of skilled labour, and that by June 2025 it employed about 450 people at the Crissier works. The company’s own careers page speaks of “over 400 people” on the Crissier production site, and its home page says production is kept local, with the design office and the workshops on the same site. The legal name is Matisa Matériel Industriel S.A., and its slogan in French is “La passion du rail.”

The Crissier works has its own labour history. German Wikipedia, citing a 2023 article by the historian Christian Koller in the bulletin of the Swiss Social Archives and a 2025 book by Dominic Iten, describes a three-week strike in March 1976, organised by employees and the Christian metalworkers’ union after 43 dismissals, which it calls the largest in the Swiss engineering industry since the Second World War; it says the company agreed to a compromise. At the time, the Lausanne weekly Domaine Public, in its issue of 29 April 1976, listed “Matisa à Crissier-Renens” first among that spring’s workplace disputes in Switzerland.

Abroad, Matisa works through subsidiaries. Its website lists companies in Australia, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Brazil, plus agents in other countries, and says its service arm handles commissioning, spare parts, retrofits, documentation and training across machine lives of 20 to 30 years. The company also says it holds certification as an Entity in Charge of Maintenance (ECM) under the European Union’s Regulation 2019/779, for function 1 and maintenance functions 2 to 4. The site is published in French, English, German and Japanese.

For a design guide, Matisa shows how a specialist maker can build a name on one machine — the tamper — and keep making it in the same Swiss works. Compare Plasser & Theurer, the Austrian track-machine maker founded in 1953, and Stadler Rail, another Swiss rail manufacturer. For this guide we use a lake slate and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Matisa’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.