In the mid-1990s, around the time when the later highly competitive mega-project “Stuttgart 21” was decided, a program ran on ARD that people with sleep problems still fondly remember today: “The most beautiful railway lines in Germany”, it was called. A train journey from the driver’s point of view could be seen from the driver’s cab, without panning the camera: rails, sleepers and signals, always straight ahead.
The broadcast was discontinued in 2013, a year after the construction of a new railway line began, which would have deserved a broadcast: the high-speed road between Ulm and Stuttgart, which runs 60 kilometers along Autobahn 8. It is scheduled to go into operation this year, from December 11, 2022, ICEs will rush along there at up to 250 kilometers per hour and, if everything goes well, save travelers a quarter of an hour.
In mid-December, the railway sent its first train driver on the line: a measuring train trundled over the freshly laid tracks at 20 km / h and checked whether everything was being built properly. On board was a camera that filmed the journey from the driver’s cab. An almost three-hour video was made from the recordings, which the cable car on Boxing Day was more of a joke uploaded to Youtube. Its success could make the program managers at ARD pause for thought: the film was viewed 10,000 times on the first day. A week later the counter is over 72,000.
The comments that some users have left under the video suggest that many actually watched the drive that runs halfway through tunnels in full – some users recommend at least double the speed when playing to adjust.
The high-speed route is sometimes mistakenly referred to as part of “Stuttgart 21”. In fact, it is something like the much more popular sister of the controversial large-scale project: at around four billion euros, half as expensive, finished faster and even makes sense from the point of view of Baden-Württemberg’s green transport minister Winfried Hermann, a veteran “Stuttgart 21” opponent .
“Stuttgart 21”, a reminder because construction started a few years ago, is about creating a completely new rail link for Baden-Württemberg’s state capital: an above-ground dead end is being replaced by a ring system of tunnels and an underground train station which has the desired side effect of creating space for living space.
The new line, which ends a few kilometers before Stuttgart, meets the tracks of “Stuttgart 21” in Wendlingen am Neckar. When both are finished, the travel time between Stuttgart and Ulm should be reduced to half an hour. As things stand, the project, whose name never promised completion in 2021, but in the 21st century, is slated to go into operation in December 2025. As early as the spring of 2022, test drives with ICEs at full speed will begin between Ulm and Wendlingen. It is already clear that there will be a camera in the driver’s cab.