More Speed Demanded in Electrifying the Railways

The non-profit alliance "Pro Rail" and the Association of German Transport Companies (VDV) called for a speeding-up of decision-making processes concerning the electrification of railway lines during a press conference on March 18.

"The federal government must significantly speed up track electrification to meet the set goals," said Dirk Flege, Managing Director of "Pro Rail."

According to the coalition agreement, 75 percent of the federal railway network is to be electrified by 2030. Currently, only about 61 percent of the 33,400-kilometer network is electrified. According to the two organizations, only 65 kilometers have been newly equipped with overhead lines annually on average in recent years.

"To reach 75 percent, our calculations show that 500 kilometers need to be newly electrified each year," said Flege.

For this, not only more funds are needed, but above all accelerated decision-making processes at the federal level, said Martin Henke, VDV Managing Director of Rail Transport. "Pro Rail" and VDV call for a general departure from the time-consuming case-by-case cost-benefit analysis (NKU) in demand plan projects for electrification measures, which the federal government currently insists on before a project can be implemented.

"We know that electrifying a line is economically sensible starting from a minimum number of train journeys. We don't need to calculate this anew in each individual case; general threshold values are sufficient," stressed Henke.

"The coalition agreement states that the expansion of electrified rail routes is in the public interest and that this will also be enshrined in law," said Flege. "This needs to be implemented as quickly as possible so that in the future the NKU can be omitted, which costs us at least one to two years of time each time." Flege provided a practical example: "What is the point of an electrification NKU for routes where there is intensive passenger or freight traffic, but which are still operated with diesel today due to the lack of overhead lines? Accelerating electrification is sensible not just for climate protection reasons. The war in Ukraine has starkly shown us that we need to reduce our energy policy dependency. In the transport sector, shifting to rail plays a key role: Transport on rail has 5.5 times lower energy consumption than transport by truck," continued the CEO of Allianz pro Schiene.

In order to significantly shift more traffic to rail in the future, the capacity of the rail network must be expanded.

"For this too, rapid electrification of additional routes is important because it makes the rail network more flexible and thus more efficient."