Deutsche Bahn is expanding: 41 heavily used routes are to be renovated in the coming years, starting with the Riedbahn. Transport Minister Wissing makes a promise in the face of the impending chaos.
Transport Minister Volker Wissing is confident that the complete renovation of the railway lines in Germany can be completed by 2031. It is well prepared, the construction industry has the capacity, the materials are there. So there is no reason why it shouldn’t work,” Wissing said in an interview with “Deutschlandfunk” on Monday morning. The construction industry, for example, recently expressed doubts that the extensive renovations will be successful as planned.
In the coming years, 41 busy railway lines are to be renovated. The Riedbahn will start on Monday evening. The heavily used Frankfurt-Mannheim connection will be closed from 11 p.m. “The Riedbahn is like a blocked main artery in an organism. It will now be disconnected, renovated, and the system will function better afterwards,” said Wissing. Tracks, overhead lines, signals, switches, bridges and stations will be modernized by mid-December. Regional and suburban trains will be completely replaced by buses during this time, and long-distance and freight traffic will be diverted.
Rail replacement transport
Major construction sites of Deutsche Bahn: These routes will be renewed in 2024
According to Deutsche Bahn, the renovation will have a positive effect on punctuality nationwide from December. In the coming years up to the end of 2030, further high-performance corridors are to follow, with the 278-kilometer route between Hamburg and Berlin starting in August next year. After a general renovation, no major construction work should be required “as a rule for several years.”
“Historic sums” for Deutsche Bahn
Wissing criticized the fact that too little money had been invested in the renovation of the railway in recent years. He, on the other hand, wanted to “invest historic sums in the railway.” “But we have significantly increased the financial lines, to a level of over 27 billion euros. And in the end we will need even more money.” The renovation of the Riedbahn will cost around 1.3 billion euros.
The transport minister believes that Deutsche Bahn has taken on too much during the European Football Championship. “What happened to some of the fans does not meet Germany’s standards and does not meet the standards I have for our transport infrastructure,” he told the “Welt am Sonntag” newspaper. “By announcing that it would provide 10,000 additional seats on trains every day during the European Championship, DB has overreached itself.” The intention behind this was certainly good. However, the network cannot cope with this additional capacity in its current state.
Deutsche Bahn board speaks of bad luck
The frequent heavy rain in the first weeks of the tournament made the situation even worse. “The network is not designed for such extreme weather conditions because the drainage systems cannot absorb these masses of water,” said Wissing.
Berthold Huber, head of railway infrastructure, defended his own company. “We really did everything we could. We postponed and cancelled all construction sites that were not necessary in order to at least have as little impact on the infrastructure as possible,” he told Deutschlandfunk. But sometimes bad luck is followed by bad luck. “We then had the flood, which more or less washed away a dam, especially between Würzburg and Nuremberg.”
The problems the railways are experiencing during the European Football Championships are no surprise to the transport minister. They knew “that the railway infrastructure is not resilient enough”. However, “starting it before the European Championships would not have been a good idea, because the disruptions would have been even greater,” said the transport minister.
Source: Stern
