Anyone traveling with Deutsche Bahn in the coming years will need more time and patience. On 15 July, the day after the European Football Championship final, the public railway company will launch an extensive renovation programme.
It plans to renovate the main railway lines until 2030. Each line will be closed for several months while the structures are painted. The first to be renewed is the central address of Germany from Frankfurt to Mannheim, known as Riedbahn.
“The Riedbahn will be the cornerstone of a successful network,” says Berthold Huber, Head of Infrastructure at Deutsche Bahn. “Nowhere else in Germany is the infrastructure so overloaded lately. Around three hundred local, long-distance and freight trains run in this direction every day. ”
This direction is disturbed by faulty diversions, signs, or force overhead lines due to the poor condition of the site. These in turn delay almost all trains on the Riedbahn line, which is about 70 kilometres long, affecting the railway. traffic throughout Germany.
Deutsche Bahn’s backlogs have been widening in recent years. In 2023, less than two-thirds of long-distance exercises arrived at their destination on time, a new record. In Germany, an exercise is considered punctual if it is less than more than six minutes late.
Train travel is reduced due to long delays and does not even reach its last stop. For Deutsche Bahn this has an advantage: reduced trips for exercise are not taken into account in punctuality statistics. If so, those statistics would be much worse.
If an exercise is delayed by more than 60 minutes, passengers can claim a portion of the ticket price. In 2023, Deutsche Bahn refunded €133 million ($143 million) due to delays. This is 43% more than in 2022. Es possible that money has simply been invested in the rail network.
The finances of the railway company are in a bad situation. Deutsche Bahn has been unable to balance its books since passenger numbers plummeted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, its deficit was around 2,400 million euros. It now finds itself suffering with a mountain of debt of around 34 billion euros.
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Repairing paints is becoming more and more expensive. In 2023, Deutsche Bahn invested a record amount of around €7. 6 billion in its infrastructure. But most of its railway systems are so obsolete that it is not possible to simply repair them. And most are not suitable for digitally controlled rail operations, which will become the norm in the future.
As a state-owned company, Deutsche Bahn relies on subsidies from the German government. However, the government has invested very little in the company over the past decades.
This lack of funding is now taking its toll. The calamity is so serious that minor interventions are no longer enough. It will be necessary to completely renew forty major axles, essential for the operation of an effective railway network. Around 4,200 kilometers of railways (roughly the width of the United States) will be affected by 2030.
The plan, the largest infrastructure program in Deutsche Bahn’s history, is expected to cost 45 billion euros. Tracks, switches and signal generation will be renewed, overhead lines will be replaced and the soundproofing of the roads near residential spaces will be improved. Construction paints Foreign trains passing through Germany will also do the same.
Trips on the detour routes will take longer. Stops on the structured routes will be available by train. Thousands of passengers will have to use other means of transport, such as buses. To this end, Deutsche Bahn is modernizing a special fleet of cars to minimize inconvenience to visitors.
German Transport Minister Volker Wissing is highly complimentary of what he calls the “luxury rail replacement service”.
“The buses will be equipped with equipment, toilets, WiFi, etc. , so that consumers feel comfortable with the replacement service for the five months,” he said.
Here’s an important note for air travelers: during the validity of the structure, it will not be possible to access Frankfurt Airport by train. The Cologne-Frankfurt high-speed line from the northwest will be closed from mid-July to mid-August. Trains will be diverted.
Following the renovation of the “Riedbahn”, the approximately 280 kilometer highway (approximately the same length as the state of New York) connecting Hamburg to Berlin will be closed and renovated. This is planned for 2025. With up to 30,000 passengers each day, about 230 regional, long-distance and freight trains circulate on these tracks daily. The line between Emmerich and Oberhausen, near the Dutch border, will also be renewed. 2025.
But Deutsche Bahn’s main financier, the German government and the federal states affected by the rail network, want to recover their over-indebted budgets. In addition, in autumn 2023, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court declared parts of the federal budget unconstitutional, making billions of euros inaccessible for rail investments.
However, if Deutsche Bahn needs its power and reliability, renewing existing lines won’t be enough. Its current rail network is running at full capacity and cannot accommodate any more trains.
To increase the number of trains, new lines would need to be built, which is hard to believe given the government’s existing austerity plans.
This article originally written in German.
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