“It’s never been this bad!” Those who commuted from Munich to Regensburg on the Alex train last summer often heard this sentence. Or from Schwandorf to Regensburg. Or even traveled to Prague for a weekend. Either it was full or there was no train at all. You also traveled quite often by bus – for the fact that you had actually booked a train journey. Still, it was cheap. All of this was available for just nine euros for three months.
By the end of September, the Länderbahn from Viechtach, Lower Bavaria, had canceled about a third of its Alex trains, which were notoriously unpunctual anyway and which run on the Munich-Prague train route, because too many employees were on sick leave or on vacation. Many transport companies had to struggle with the Corona summer wave, but only with the Alex did it lead to such massive failures. The reason for this is also the locomotive-car trains of the Alex, which make it necessary for a specially trained train attendant to travel with them, as Wolfgang Oeser, spokesman for the Bavarian Railway Company (BEG), which orders regional rail transport for the Free State, explains. “The Alex trains are not allowed to run without these train attendants.” This means an even higher risk of train cancellations due to sick leave.
This company, of all people, has now been awarded the contract for the route from Munich to Prague by this same BEG. The route to Hof, which runs parallel to Schwandorf, will continue to be operated by DB Regio.
The Alex has been at the bottom of the BEG punctuality ranking for years. He was able to improve the quality of service, such as cleanliness or customer orientation of the train staff, but at a low level. In railway forums and comment columns, the partially “historical” wagons are lamented, which are not only a challenge for wheelchair users.
Commuters were all the more relieved when the BEG initially awarded the ÖBB subsidiary Allegra the contract for the route. The Austrian Federal Railway has a good reputation among Bavarian train drivers, is considered punctual and clean, and there are also sockets and the Internet. The joy didn’t last long. In July, the procurement chamber of southern Bavaria conceded the BEG decision, one of the losing bidders – presumably the state railway – had lodged an objection. There were doubts as to whether Allegra would be able to rely on the necessary financial and technical support from the parent company ÖBB.
53 percent of the delays are due to the overloaded rail infrastructure
So now again unpunctual Alex trains. However, the provincial railways are not solely to blame for this misery. “The transport company itself was responsible for 35 percent of the delays,” calculates BEG spokesman Oeser. However, 53 percent of the delays on the Alex in 2021 are caused by the railway infrastructure. For example, through the 150-kilometer single-track route from Schwandorf to Pilsen or the section from Freising to Munich, which is completely overloaded. Also, long sections of the route are not yet electrified, which sometimes makes it necessary to change locomotives.
Improvements to the Munich-Prague route have been called for for years. The declared goal – for example by Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann at the first Bavarian-Czech railway summit in 2017 – was to reduce the travel time from more than six hours to just over four. This has not changed the net travel time of commuters for years. In the meantime, the “East Corridor South” from Hof via Weiden to Regensburg as well as the route from Nuremberg towards the Czech border are mentioned in the traffic light coalition agreement as a “systemically important railway line”.
Small improvements can be expected from December 2023 – not because of but in spite of the Alex. The lines from Prague and Hof then no longer have to be coupled together in Schwandorf in Upper Palatinate, but continue alternately to Munich. This results in an hourly direct connection. By eliminating shunting, the BEG hopes to save time and that “delays in one part of the train will no longer be transferred to the other part of the train.” You don’t save hours with it, but a few minutes – and nerves.