Austriantrain
Established Member
- Joined
- 13 Aug 2018
- Messages
- 1,325
There are benefits and drawbacks to Germany's shape and population distribution. On the one hand, it makes it very difficult to build new high-speed mainlines between one very large city and a series of medium-sized cities, in the French or Spanish way.
On the other hand, it makes it much easier to get good loadings and justify investment right across the country, as intercity flows are much less strongly directional and involve lots of travel between all places along a given line.
Germany also benefits from a large number of decent-quality intercity railway lines, often providing several alternative routes between major city pairs. Unfortunately, this has also given the railway an excuse to invest little into new lines, whilst trying to fit an increasing amount of both intercity, freight, and regional services on to inadequate double track mixed-traffic lines. For example, going from the Ruhr towards Hamburg or Berlin you have two route choices - via Osnabruck or via Hamm/Bielefeld/Minden. But both of these have long double-track sections with each a 2-4tph regional service, 1tph semi-fast, 2-3tph fast + plenty of freight.
There is now beginning to be some thought of whether a new pair of tracks along one of these routes (probably the latter) might conceivably be a good idea - but this is at least 10-15 years away. Same situation for Frankfurt-Mannheim/Heidelberg. And even then, they will almost inevitably insist on running some 200kph 'regional' services over these high speed lines, in addition possibly to some freight!
Effectively, the German strategy of mixing fast/regional/freight traffic on virtually all lines derives from their geography and is partly inevitable, but the German ideological insistence on it is fundamentally incompatible with the intensive service that is now run in the country. Every single other major country in Europe (including GB) seems to understand this, just not Germany.
I am not so sure that the issue is „understanding“. I rather think the reasons lie in the federal and very decentralized German political system, thus the need to gather local support - getting freight off classic lines at night, reducing noise (even though the reality is then mostly different); serving regional stations so that the local population not only suffers the „cost“ of building new lines, but also profit…
France and the UK OTOH are extremely centralized political systems, making „riding roughshod“ over local opposition much easier.
I do agree that the results are suboptimal (having gradients suitable for freight will increase construction costs and the wear and tear the freights cause will increase maintenance costs; adding regional stations will strongly reduce capacity).
Another example is the northern approaches to the Brenner Base Tunnel: logically, the only decent approach would be to route freights as far away from Munich as possible. Munich is massively congested and every capacity increase there is bound to cost much, much more than in more rural areas. However, those rural areas are very well-off and very important electorally for the Bavarian CSU. So it’s a „njet“ from Bavaria, and that’s it. No German federal government, even though it does not currently include the CDU, can go over the head of the regional government.
But: it is very unrealistic to suppose the political system will change. So better to get on with it. The simple fact remains that Germany has invested much too little in infrastructure in general and rail in particular in the last twenty years in a misguided philosophy to reduce expenditure at all costs (while interest rates were low and would have made building new rather a good investment) and now they will have to bear the costs of those false economies.
Last edited: