Austriantrain
Established Member
- Joined
- 13 Aug 2018
- Messages
- 1,323
One thing that I've noticed is that there's a strange tendency in Germany to renovate/demolish things that don't really need to be touched, while ignoring more pressing issues. A good example is in Zittau, where a large and expensive renovation of the platforms and signalling took place. It was really not clear to me why they spent so much money on this (around 45m EUR) for such little traffic, especially given that there's absolutely no sign of any agreement with the Polish PKP regarding the transit route to Liberec.
Yes, modernisation was nice there, but was it really needed?
This is exactly why it doesn't surprise me that this was a maintenance issue. Germany has really severe problems with maintaining public infrastructure, and as others have said, there have to be serious concerns that the rest of the railway network is in a similarly catastrophic state.
A lot of station investment on the continent is for accessibility purposes, Austria is doing a lot of it too.
As to the signaling job in Zittau, I obviously don’t know any details, but if you want to centralize signaling and thus reduce operating costs, you will have to invest too.
Quite often, it is a good idea to combine those two in one operation, because for accessibility, track layout might have to be changed. And if you need possessions, better do everything at once.
So I don’t think investing in Zittau is a bad idea per se. It is just a fact that Germany has been investing too little into infrastructure for at least two decades, ever since they decided that balancing the budget is the *only* thing that counts (it *is* important obviously, but it turned into kind of a religion.)