In mid-November, a good five months after the fatal train accident in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, regular trains should be running on the route again. The repair work on the line should be completed on November 16, a spokeswoman for Deutsche Bahn said on request. After that, rail operations will be fully resumed. The spokeswoman again gave no information on the costs.
Work on the route is currently in full swing. At the same time, Deutsche Bahn is eliminating slow-moving sections in the Werdenfels and Oberland regions as part of its EUR 80 million investment program; From October on, some tracks are to be renewed.
At the start of the school year on September 13, trains should be running again on the Tutzing-Kochel, Garmisch-Partenkirchen-Mittenwald and Garmisch-Partenkirchen-Pfronten-Steinach routes. The route between Murnau and Oberammergau will probably continue to be used by buses as replacement traffic until mid-December.
In the accident in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the beginning of June, four women and a 13-year-old died, dozens of people were injured, some seriously. As a consequence, the railways began to check around 200,000 concrete sleepers nationwide, 137,000 of which are being replaced as a precaution. According to the railways, this has already happened on 70 sections of the route, and work is still pending on 155. According to the railway, the components are the same type of construction as on the section of the train that crashed.
Passengers must expect detours, longer travel times or rail replacement services. Most sleepers are to be replaced by the end of the year, but some of the replacements will drag on into next year. “Even if the investigations have not yet been completed and the cause of the accident has not yet been determined, DB has decided as a precaution to examine identical sleepers in the network,” the group recently explained. He suspects a manufacturer error. “Some of the sleepers have irregularities in the material properties.”