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Electrification of railway lines is progressing slowly
The electrification of routes has progressed only slowly in recent years. Photo: Daniel Karmann/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Train travel should be climate-neutral by 2040 at the latest. For this purpose, more routes are to be electrified where diesel has been used up to now. But at the current pace, that will not succeed.
More electrified routes, fewer diesel locomotives – this should make rail transport in Germany more climate-friendly.
But the electrification of the routes has progressed slowly in recent years, according to a government response to a request from the Die Linke parliamentary group, which is available to the German Press Agency. From 2010 to 2020, 647 kilometers were given overhead lines. This corresponds to almost two percent of the network. The left-wing traffic politician Bernd Riexinger spoke of a shocking balance sheet.
In 2020, 61 percent of the German rail network was electrified. According to the railways, around 90 percent of passenger and freight traffic runs over it. The coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP has set itself the goal of having 75 percent electrified routes by 2030. Instead of around 65 kilometers per year, as recently, 500 kilometers would have to be electrified annually, as the lobby organization Pro-Rail Alliance emphasizes.
Shutting down is not an option
Because shutting down tracks and thus increasing the proportion of routes under electricity is no longer an option. Only last year, the railway announced that it would reactivate 245 kilometers. This is just the beginning, they said. The annual report for 2021 presented last week no longer shows a minus in the length of operations. From 2010 to 2020, the network had shrunk by 155 kilometers to a total of 33,286 kilometers.
“An essential step on the way to climate neutrality is the electrification of additional routes,” emphasizes the management. After four years, the so-called Southern Railway was electrified on the Ulm-Friedrichshafen-Lindau section. Despite almost doubling the costs to 595 million euros, the green light was also given in February for the so-called central Germany connection on the 115-kilometer Weimar-Gera-Gößnitz section.
The transport politician Riexinger sees no reason to give the all-clear. Many current projects only went into operation after 2030, he criticized. “The ministry does not seem to attach any importance to the coalition agreement, at least not in the sense that it feels obliged to do so,” he commented on the answers from Minister Volker Wissing’s (FDP) house. Like the Pro-Rail Alliance and the Association of German Transport Companies, the left calls for faster decision-making processes and, for example, the waiver of cost-benefit studies for each individual case.