Storms, strikes, construction sites: There are plenty of reasons for railway cancellations. In the best case scenario, a rail replacement bus will be available quickly. A visit to the control center.
There are two huge screens on Omeed Al-Saadi’s desk. They show a protocol table and a map of the Rhine-Main region with small dots. Each dot represents a bus: green dots represent on-time buses, blue dots represent early buses, and red dots represent late buses. Almost all dots are green, one is blue.
Al-Saadi does not work for a bus company, but for a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, more precisely: DB SEV GmbH. He and his colleagues are sitting in a gray-brown building on a side street in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. The window overlooks a bus parking lot. In this inconspicuous place, decisions are made about rail replacement transport for the whole of Germany.
And that is more necessary than ever. Deutsche Bahn is in the largest restructuring process in its history. More than 4,000 kilometers of rail need to be overhauled. Many trains are therefore being rerouted and they can no longer run on many routes. This is why rail replacement transport is necessary; So buses have to be set up to serve the routes. Last year alone, this was necessary in 2,000 cases, plus 12,500 short-term emergency interventions, for example in the event of storm damage or when people were on the tracks.
“Two to three failures per hour are nice,” says trained professional driver Al-Saadi. Then he would have a relaxed shift. But often enough, for example during strikes or storms, he and his 29 colleagues have significantly more to do. The so-called dispatchers take care of organizing the buses. A total of around 120 people work at the railway subsidiary.
In practice, their work looks like this: Al-Saadi and his colleagues are informed by the railway about short-term train cancellations, for example due to storm damage. They then start calling companies within a 50 kilometer radius and then place the order for the required duration. The aim is to have a bus on site within one to two hours.
In three-shift operation, the team is staffed around the clock. There is enough to do: 2,300 replacement bus trips per day and a distance of 24 million kilometers every year. That’s twice as many trips as when the company was founded in 2019. Until then, the local transport companies had to organize them themselves. In other words: pick up the phone yourself and find a bus, create the timetable and then monitor whether everything is running smoothly.
Inquiries no longer come exclusively from Deutsche Bahn, but also from other private railway companies that operate individual routes in Germany. Managing director Frank Nostitz expects an increase of a further 15 to 20 percent this year and in the coming years due to Deutsche Bahn’s major construction offensive.
Part of the construction offensive is the Riedbahn line between Frankfurt am Main and Mannheim, which Al-Saadi is currently monitoring. There have been no trains on the 74 kilometers since mid-July and until December. It is the largest rail replacement service that Deutsche Bahn has managed to date with its own buses. DB SEV usually awards the majority of orders to its more than 3,500 partner companies, i.e. regional bus companies. The busy Riedbahn line is one of the 41 corridors that are being renovated as part of the general renovation of Deutsche Bahn. You can read more about the renovation plans here. A total of 150 of the railway’s own purple buses currently transport up to 16,000 passengers.
Company boss Nostitz is visibly satisfied with the progress so far. Rail replacement services are often unpopular because they usually take longer than the usual train connection and sometimes require additional changes for passengers, he says. But in our own survey, 78 percent of passengers gave the replacement service for the Riedbahn a grade of one or two. However, it is also true that one in ten people switched from the train to the car or motorcycle because of the construction work. Read more about this here.