For many years, traffic on the Gotteszell-Viechtach railway line was subject to restrictions. The Bavarian state parliament has now agreed to convert the previous trial operation into regular operation. “The train is coming,” said CSU MP Stefan Ebner on his Facebook page on Wednesday. “So the very last hurdle has been overcome.”
The vote in the plenary session was considered the last hurdle for the route in the Regen district. It had previously regularly caused disputes: between supporters of the railway on the one hand and their critics on the other. Traffic between Gotteszell and Viechtach was actually shut down in the 1990s. But because, among other things, a citizens’ initiative put pressure on it, a trial operation was introduced on the route in 2016. Bavaria’s Transport Minister Kerstin Schreyer (CSU) wanted to stop this temporarily, but rowed back after protests. In February 2024, Schreyer’s successor Christian Bernreiter (CSU) announced that the Free State would make an exception to the otherwise strict reactivation criteria for the route. At the time, all parliamentary groups in the state parliament’s transport committee agreed to this, except for the AfD.