As soon as two snowflakes fall, chaos breaks out on the train. How much you would like to be a pigeon and just fly to your destination.
Photo: IMAGO/Sven Simon
Deutsche Bahn’s “Company Future” began in 1994. The company realigned itself with the merger of East and West, the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the Deutsche Bundesbahn, and went public. Today people tend to associate negative words such as “rail replacement service” and “line damage” with Deutsche Bahn. How could it come to this?
Podcast host Charlotte Thielemann and Joana Voss get to the bottom of this question in the six-part podcast “Driving More Expensively.” The former “More Expensive Living” podcast team shows how politics, election campaigns and German unity in the railway sense are connected. They talk to former railway employees and bosses, tunnel builders and traffic planners, politicians and passenger rights activists about “the Erfurt bump” on the Berlin to Munich route, “Stuttgart 21” and the dilapidated Riedbahn from Frankfurt to Mannheim. Almost all important rail connections are facing fundamental renovation – this affects a total of 41 route corridors.
The interviewees are all part of a puzzle characterized by tiring power struggles, which runs through our railway landscape not only to the detriment of passengers.
The fact that the podcast begins with a queue on the Japanese Shinkansen bullet train and the resulting scandalous 17 minutes of delay is a smart move. Because: The Shinkansen, which is delayed by an average of 12 seconds, has been around since 1964. The train as we know it today has only been around for 30 years.
After this entry, Thielemann and Voss look for a disused overtaking track in Zwingenberg, Hesse. That almost seems a bit helpless when you consider that the railway has completely different problems than any track in the middle of nowhere. “Why is this track rusting away?” asks Charlotte Thielemann, then the podcast picks up speed.
The investigative team wants to understand which decisions cost the railway so many millions and is taking on one of Deutsche Bahn’s most prestigious projects: the four-hour high-speed line from Berlin to Munich. Thielemann asks why the train takes a detour via Erfurt through the middle of the Thuringian Forest. As in “living more expensively,” the team lets the numbers speak for themselves. With 27 tunnels with a total length of 41 kilometers and 37 bridges with a total length of 12 kilometers, the Berlin-Munich route currently costs 10 billion euros. The part through the Thuringian Forest from Erfurt to Nuremberg alone accounts for 22 of the 27 tunnels. According to Matthias Wissmann (CDU), the then transport minister, the cost was 5.8 billion euros. Once the construction is finished, it will cost 13 billion euros. It is already the most expensive route ever built in Germany.
Traffic planner Martin Viereck leafs through an atlas: Erfurt is not on the way, but means a 90-kilometer detour. Viereck then reports on his fight for a different route that would have included Gera and Leipzig. The route would have saved the country a lot of money and passengers a lot of time. Munich would have been reachable from Berlin in three and a half hours; instead of 22 tunnels, Viereck says he might have built three tunnels. Each tunnel is a major cost factor: a kilometer of tunnel costs approximately seven times as much as a normal kilometer without a tunnel. The podcast explains why the project was stopped and ultimately implemented as planned.
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Thielmann and Voss are clearly focusing on the VDE 8 project (the expansion and new construction of the route between Berlin and Nuremberg), which breaks down a complex topic to a simple denominator. The interviewees are all part of a puzzle characterized by tiring power struggles, which runs through our railway landscape not only to the detriment of passengers.
An employee of the Pro Bahn passenger association has put together the top 5 reasons for delays: The signal boxes are outdated and some of them date back to the imperial era. Every fourth switch is bad, defective or insufficient. There are massive delays due to switch disruptions. Other reasons include incorrect traffic light displays (“red lighting”), cable damage and overhead line faults. The employee criticizes the “save and drive without wear and tear” tactic of then railway boss Hartmut Mehdorn. The “More Expensive Driving” team asked him to talk about the train debacle. What this reveals remains to be seen.
Three of a total of six episodes of “Driving More Expensively” are already available on all common podcast platforms and in the ARD audio library.
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