2024-02-17 09:55:09
Deutsche Bahn will close the country’s busiest route for five months from mid-June. Is there a risk of major replacement traffic chaos? The railway is optimistic after a test run.
It is the largest railway construction site in decades: With the final whistle of the European Football Championship final, Deutsche Bahn (DB) will begin the general renovation of the Frankfurt-Mannheim line, also known as the Riedbahn, on July 15th.
For five months, until the timetable change on December 14th, neither ICEs nor regional and S-Bahn trains will run on the country’s most used rail section. Millions of passengers will be affected by the complete closure. While they are rerouted on long-distance transport, which increases the journey time by 30 minutes, travelers on regional transport have to switch to buses.
Chaos and anger seem to be inevitable, especially in the hot summer. And anyway: Who believes that the railway company won’t ultimately need much longer for the so-called corridor renovation? Something will go wrong again – right?
Bahn optimistic after dress rehearsal
DB Infrastructure board member Berthold Huber is the last person who doesn’t know enough about such sayings. And yet he appeared optimistic in front of journalists in Berlin on Thursday. The reason for this: from the railway’s perspective, the results of the dress rehearsal of the general renovation, which the company carried out in January, were encouraging. Buses ran on the route instead of trains for four weeks, during which time the railway replaced all tracks, cable harnesses and signaling systems on a nine-kilometer section.
“We have achieved what no one thought we could do,” says Huber. “Overall, we managed to bring 400 percent more construction volume onto the track than with the conventional construction method, in which we proceed with a ‘rolling wheel’ with individual partial closures.”
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The fact that the railway had to extend the campaign, which was actually only planned for three weeks, by a whole week – a delay of a third of the estimated time – had to do, among other things, with the railway strikes, but also with the weather conditions: “The black ice has us cost at least a day.” In addition, putting the old technology back into operation took longer than originally expected. “It would be gone anyway after the complete renovation, so that shouldn’t be a problem in the fall.”
The busiest route in Germany
Just how necessary the renovation of the Riedbahn is can be seen from a few figures: 16,000 passengers use the almost 70 kilometer long north-south axis every day in regional transport alone, plus long-distance and freight transport. In total, more than 300 trains roll along the route every day. The route is the busiest in the entire republic. The result, says Huber: “The route is too full, too old, too broken.”
That is why the railway has decided for the first time to carry out a general renovation, in which the entire railway corridor will be closed for a manageable period of time and not, as usual, train traffic will be restricted for construction work for years. All tracks, power systems and signals as well as the control and safety technology are to be completely renovated.
Goal: After the core renovation, there should be peace for a few years – and the many delays, for example due to signal disruptions, should be a thing of the past. After the Riedbahn, other routes will soon be repaired in a similar manner. The Berlin-Hamburg route will follow in 2025, and the railway wants to get around 4,000 kilometers of route back in shape by 2030.
Until then, rail travelers have to keep their nerve and do so for months. Because – of course – not only the diversion route for the ICEs takes longer, but also the regional replacement bus service. And it is also clear that, despite all of the train’s time buffers, something unforeseen can still happen and go wrong. Optimism or not: In the end, no one can rule out that the construction work will not be delayed after all.