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It is estimated that the full electrification of all railway tracks in Germany will be completed not earlier than 2070.

But maybe I am confusing "Deutschlandtakt 2070" and the electrification of the tracks.




yeah, you are; however given the zero amount of interest shown on focusing on the train system by the department for mobility, doesn't give much hope it's going to happen before 2070... they want to build more and bigger high ways such that there is less traffic jam, thus less emissions, which is just hilarious.


Problem is, Germany is in a central location in Europe. Lots of east-west and north-south transit going through. That transit has to use the autobahn, for various reasons.

One is the EU: forcing them to use railway loading (such as in Switzerland) isn't possible due to the EU demanding free transit. Making transit on the autobahn prohibitively expensive by fees isn't possible, because the EU can and will veto higher fees or special transit fees. Changing status quo in the EU isn't possible, because all Germany's neighbours will veto.

Second is technical: Railways aren't standardized. Track width changes towards the east. Train station platforms and tunnels are different width and height per country, your load will bump into stuff unless you do lowest-common-size (which is smaller than a normal 20ft/40ft container crosssection, so non-viable). Signaling is different in each and every EU country. Rolling stock for goods transport is usually decades old and doesn't support any of the necessary modern safety standards like ECTS that are used on new tracks and cross-border. So you would have to have huge reloading terminals on each railway track and each border. Or you would have to modernize the railway system across Europe. Huge costs and lack of current demand create a chicken-egg-scenario here. Also, reloading creates delays, which the current just-in-time logistics are allergic to.

Third is domestic: There is also non-transit traffic, where origin or destination is somewhere in Germany. Those will still have to use roads, because the country doesn't have a dense-enough railway network. And building a sufficiently dense one would take forever, if at all possible. New construction is usually extremely expensive, delayed or stopped due to environmental/noise/landmark protection reasons (usually NIMBYs successfully abusing those regs). Only possibility is small extensions, such as "make this road/track/... a little wider", because it is already there which makes arguing against it on the aforementioned grounds harder.

So we maybe will debate if railways ever will take off and then just extend the autobahn. Because there is actually no other choice.


Deutschlandtakt has nothing to do with electrification. And full electrification isn't planned for any point in time, there will (if it goes as planned) never be a fully electrified railway network. They are planning to either shut down small branches or use locomotives with batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.


Well as of 2021 54% of German tracks are already electrified and have a 75% 2030 goal, so to claim it's going to take 50 years to do the other 46% seems wildly off base.


Never heard that "Deutschlandtakt 2070" (lol) depends on electrification of all railway tracks, to be honest. Would be interesting to read up on that, so if you have a source, I'd be glad to read it!




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