For the small town of Weidenbach in the Mühldorf district, the regional CSU member of the Bundestag and then Secretary of State for the Interior, Stephan Mayer, announced “a very good solution” last summer. Because the current level crossing in Weidenbach does not get along well with express trains, which according to the previous plans of the federal government and Deutsche Bahn should be traveling at up to 200 kilometers per hour from 2030 on the then double-tracked and electrified railway line between Munich, Mühldorf and Salzburg. Leaving out the crossing and letting the cars drive a nearly two-kilometer loop over the next bridge would, according to Mayer, have been “a prank.” So Mayer’s party friend and then cabinet colleague Andreas Scheuer said one of his last words of power as Federal Minister of Transport and ordered the railways to build a railway bridge for Weidenbach in return for a municipal additional payment of half a million euros. The DB Group representative for Bavaria, Klaus-Dieter Josel, has now made the calculation: This bridge alone will cost eight million euros and, in conjunction with a new federal law, will delay the long-awaited expansion throughout south-east Bavaria by several years and will probably make it more expensive .
The Royal Bavarian State Railways have been planning this double-track expansion since they put the single-track line from Munich towards Mühldorf into operation in 1871. To put it simply, the advantage for the federal government and the railways is that the 150-kilometre strip for the second track has been public property for more than 150 years. Nevertheless, people in the region have been waiting for generations for the expansion, which has been discussed again and again and up to now has always disappeared into the drawer. The economy in the Bavarian chemical triangle has been pushing for better rail connections for just as long. After all, the single-track route, which is often still used by old railcars, is part of the European railway line between Paris and Budapest. In addition to heavy freight trains and thousands of commuters every day, it will one day also accommodate a large part of the fast train traffic between Munich and Salzburg.
Concrete planning has been going on since 2013, with an estimated total cost of 3.2 billion euros, the project is currently one of the larger and more important in Germany. And if it had been up to the train, then she wouldn’t have had to “start from scratch again” in Weidenbach, as a spokesman says. In Berlin, last year the Deutsche Bahn emissaries were also unable to prevent the Federal Ministry of Transport from naming this project as one of those projects that it wants to continue with the “Preparation Act for Measures” that came into force in 2020. This law is intended to speed up major projects by allowing them to be decided directly by the Bundestag. In comparison to an official approval as before, critics then have fewer opportunities to sue. However, the railways expect that the expansion of the Mühldorfer railway line will be one of the first corresponding projects to end up before the constitutional court together with the entire law. But even so, the new approach will delay the project by several years, because the necessary steps for the environmental assessment no longer have to be worked out simultaneously, but one after the other.
Points of contention are almost always level crossings
The fact that all this should now take longer is met with criticism in the regional project advisory board – including from Stephan Mayer, who is no longer State Secretary in the Federal Cabinet but CSU General Secretary. A solution like the ones Mayer, Scheuer and local politicians like the Mühldorfer CSU District Administrator Max Heimerl for Weidenbach would also be right for other towns and communities along the route. Because disputes between municipalities and railways are almost always level crossings as well as overpasses and underpasses.
According to DB, there are still 23 level crossings on the route, plus 166 “bridge structures”. These are by no means always real railway bridges like the ones near Garching over the Alz and over the Brunnthaler Graben from 1907. Both are listed buildings, which is why the planners for the second track want to put a slender bridge next to them, at least from one side should hardly be seen. Most of the bridge structures are simply railway or road overpasses. If a municipality has to bring its underpass up to date with the latest regulations or even has special requests, it has to bear a large part of the costs for this itself.
That’s why the city council of Tittmoning in the district of Traunstein has passed a resolution not to be left alone by the federal government. The DB accuses the city of “a lack of transparency, misinformation and a lack of willingness to cooperate”. The task of informing the citizens is passed on to the municipality. Deutsche Bahn rejects all of this, there are always information events, most recently virtual in the pandemic. In principle, however, the city council in Tittmoning also supports “the two-track, electrified expansion that has been urgently needed for our region for decades”. According to DB, it should save 120 million car kilometers, 20 million truck kilometers and 23,000 tons of CO₂ – per year and now years later.