It is “a program without precedent in DB’s history,” Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard Lutz said on Friday when the plan to upgrade 9,000 kilometers of German railway lines was announced.
Can cost up to 80 billion Euros
The plan is that over the next seven years, at least 45 billion Euros will be spent on upgrading 40 sections of track to high-capacity railways. However, the amount is rather a staggering 80 billion Euros, as the 45 billion is an extra grant from the federal state, which must be added to already planned projects.
20 percent of Denmark’s GDP
Especially in a Danish context, this is a lot of money – converted to 596,408,000,000 (596.4 billion) kroner. In round numbers, this is a fifth of Denmark’s gross domestic product (GDP) – or over ten Fehmarn connections. Germany’s economy is the world’s third largest with a GDP of around 4,000 billion Euros, so that money can well be found in the household budget. It will be more difficult to find the legs on which the money will go.
Must hire 25,000
Deutsche Bahn informs FemernReport that they expect to hire an additional 25,000 employees as a result of the upgrade project. They come on top of the 25,000 new hires Deutsche Bahn made in 2022. This must be seen in light of the fact that across Europe there is a shortage of qualified, skilled labour. At EU level, the expectation is that within five years there will be a shortage of more than five million skilled workers – and this is the labor market that DB must recruit from.
European steel sold out
However, it is not only Deutsche Bahn that is in the middle of major infrastructure projects. Across most of the world, the green changeover is giving unusually good business to both contractors and raw material suppliers. The Fehmarn project has already had to go to China for steel, bolts and nuts, because the European suppliers have reported that they have sold out.
5.4 million tons of rails
9,000 kilometers of railway tracks correspond to 5.4 million tonnes of steel, and such quantities are not stored in many places. In addition, there is concrete for sleepers and a fairly significant number of bolts and nuts. A project of this magnitude will also require a large part of the special machinery and construction equipment available on the market.
German bureaucracy
The above mentioned are, however, technical challenges for which an (engineering) technical solution can certainly be found in one form or another. The real headache is German bureaucracy.
“Plan confirmation procedure”
Three years into the Fehmarn project, most of those involved have already learned the German chancellery term “Planfeststellungsverfahren”, which covers the official processing and approval of large infrastructure projects. It is this process that is the direct reason why the work on the German side of the Fehmarn project is several years behind both the plan and the Danish works.
Complaints about noise nuisance, nature conservation and environmental impacts can all be brought before the courts – with suspensive effect. And since Germany is a federal state, all such cases can in principle be brought all the way from the state to the federal level. That this sort of thing takes time is evidenced by the last complaint about the five-man connection. It was only completed last December.
Questionable schedule
The upgrade of the German railway infrastructure is necessary and it is also feasible. But whether it can be implemented before 2030 is doubtful. We are still talking about 9,000 kilometers, and there is still not a plan for the 88 kilometers between Puttgarden and Lübeck.
