Nuremberg: Planned ICE plant triggers enormous protests – Bavaria

If you can’t say anything about Carsten Burmeister, then it’s a lack of ability to suffer or a lack of diplomacy. As long as Corona allowed it, he walked through halls full of people who showered him with criticism for hours. Burmeister’s arguments, presented calmly and factually, rarely got through because hardly anyone wanted to hear them. What he said was automatically questioned – or immediately declared wrong. Nevertheless, he recently praised the “very constructive discussions with citizens” in his video blog. He is pleased that “the factual willingness to talk was always there and will continue to be there”.

As project manager, Carsten Burmeister is Deutsche Bahn’s lightning conductor when it comes to the planned ICE maintenance workshop in the Nuremberg area. The state-owned rail company wants to invest more than 400 million euros there and create around 450 collectively agreed jobs for skilled workers. Above all, they are supposed to repair at night what annoys passengers every day: clogged toilets, defective air conditioning, galleys or digital seat displays. Nuremberg is one of the most important hubs in German long-distance rail traffic, hence the choice of location.

When Deutsche Bahn announced its Nuremberg plan in autumn 2020, not only Prime Minister Markus Söder and Mayor Marcus König (both CSU) could hardly contain their enthusiasm. Such an investment in the old railway town of all places, where the first train in Germany left in 1835. Where tens of thousands of industrial jobs were lost at the end of the twentieth century. Where for decades people pointed enviously to Munich because everything was said to be concentrated there, the big companies, the big investments, the big job machines. And then the announcement by Deutsche Bahn that it would invest in Nuremberg in secure jobs in the climate protection industry of the future. It couldn’t have gone any better, could it?

“We will tie ourselves to the trees,” threaten opponents of the project

The enthusiasm from back then is long gone. The reality since then has been that of Carsten Burmeister. He experiences them every day when he communicates with people on site, online, by telephone or at meetings. In October he was in Wendelstein south-east of Nuremberg, population 16,000. 300 people in the packed hall and many outside in front of the door, where the citizens’ meeting was transmitted via video. “We will fight to the end,” threatened a troubled woman in front of a television camera.

In Feucht, adults sent children with slogans pasted over them to the microphone in the hall: “Leave our forest alone.” From all corners, Burmeister hears half-announcements of war, like in Harrlach near Allersberg: “We will tie ourselves to the trees.”

Terrified, Lord Mayor König and the Nuremberg City Council quickly closed the city gates when violent citizen protests flared up at the locations in the city area. From an initial nine possible locations for the ICE plant, three are left. All are outside of Nuremberg, two of them near Feucht. 45 hectares of land are required; the disused ammunition factory near Feucht is traded as a probable location. A wooded area contaminated underground and therefore closed to the public since the late 1940s. In February, the railway wants to apply for a spatial planning procedure for all three locations.

On Thursday, the railway started an attempt to loosen the hardened fronts. She invited 20 mayors, members of the state and federal parliaments from the region to a round table, which is to become a working group accompanying the project. But the representatives of the people are under pressure, even those who realize that climate protection also means plants like the ICE plant. But there are also economic arguments.

“We need this ICE plant and these jobs in Middle Franconia without any ifs or buts,” says the Middle Franconian DGB chairman Stephan Doll. “If you include the suppliers for the plant, there are a thousand new, high-quality jobs and the associated important training positions for young people. One should be grateful that this opportunity exists.” Especially since nobody knows how many jobs the transformation of the automotive industry will cost at the numerous suppliers in and around Nuremberg. And anyway: “We all want to stop climate change and the railways have a particularly important role to play,” says Stephan Doll.

The railway does not want to do without the ICE plant

Opponents of the ICE plant say that up to 20,000 trees should not be cleared for the ICE plant. This is an unacceptable, even devastating intervention in the Reichswald forest, which is important for Feucht, Wendelstein and ultimately also for Nuremberg as a local recreation area and ecologically. Jürgen Wechsler, former Bavarian IG Metall boss, made the counter calculation: A total of 0.0004 percent of the Bavarian tree population would have to be sacrificed. In view of the five million trees that are cut down in Bavaria every year, the 20,000 were not significant.

In this area of ​​tension, Carsten Burmeister constantly assures that he will take all arguments, present them to the ICE plant planners and, wherever possible, suggestions from opponents will also be taken into account. However, the railway does not want to do without the ICE plant. In discussions with the politicians, said Bavaria’s rail boss Klaus-Dieter Josel afterwards, it at least became clear “that the expansion of climate-friendly rail transport in Germany is at the top of the political agenda, despite controversial discussions”.

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