> Earlier this month, after weeks of speculation over the future of Britain’s planned HS2 high-speed rail link from Birmingham to Manchester, the prime minister finally announced that the northern leg was to be scrapped.
Actually Germany has and is building&upgrading new train lines and is buying new trains. It's also building/upgrading new train stations in major cities.
There is an extensive public transport system with regional trains and also long distance trains. Core technical infrastructure in many places for them is old. Especially computer controlled train operations have to be introduced in many places.
Upgrading this takes a decade or more and this process is very expensive and will cause even more delays during the update phase. It will partly get worse, before it gets better.
For example the high-speed connection between Hamburg and Berlin (roughly every 30 minutes ICE trains travel in both directions) will be upgraded during the next two years and there will be longer travel times for several months.
Upgrading the major train stations is also very difficult, since most of them are in the center of already dense cities. Here in Hamburg one of the important ICE train stations (Altona, where several ICE trains are starting) will be moved to a new place in the city (a few km apart). The train station then will no longer be a terminus (trains now enter/leave only in one direction), which will improve travel times. Cost will be more than 0.5 billion Euros.
One factor which also makes upgrading the infrastructure difficult is the very low unemployment rate, which makes it difficult to find trained workers...
I was in the Donau valley two years ago (a gorgeous place) and the local train station for a village of under thousand people had fully mechanical operation! As in: levers, pulleys, weights that had to be cranked up, springs and even those cool mechanical sign posts that work on gravity and steel rods.
It was beautiful engineering, I spent hours watching it all being operated by two men who lived on the station. I can only imagine how such old tech is holding everything back. But can also appreciate how it just keeps running: it just needs skilled humans, and lots of grease.
> One factor which also makes upgrading the infrastructure difficult is the very low unemployment rate, which makes it difficult to find trained workers...
Does the German government have a history of offering competitive pay to train system workers, sufficiently high to make it a more attractive option than a Mon to Fri 8AM to 4PM desk job?
Try to find skilled workers now. There are many industries/professions in competition. It's also not the "german government", which employs train system workers.
For infrastructure, it does not matter if it is the government directly paying or not, either way it is society’s leaders deciding not to sufficiently invest.
And what is a “skilled” worker? Is it someone who has to use their hands (not on a keyboard) and work outdoors and evenings/nights/weekends, and has to do a job that cannot be done sitting in a chair?
Because for as long as I have been alive, I have seen many societies around the world not offer the rewards to go into that type of work, and instead offering comparatively high rewards for desk work.
Experts in digital train infrastructure, for example.
The digital infrastructure for train systems is crucial. Companies like Siemens provide equipment. These are complex projects to convert old infrastructure (signalling & control) to modern digital systems. There are literally thousands of complex projects necessary to upgrade the old train system.
This also necessary for local public transport. For example my local train connection to the city has recently been upgraded with digital systems capable to support autonomous train operation. This was one of the first in Germany. Still the trains are not driving autonomously. Much more effort is needed to provide higher throughput for passenger transport.
Actually Germany has and is building&upgrading new train lines and is buying new trains. It's also building/upgrading new train stations in major cities.
There is an extensive public transport system with regional trains and also long distance trains. Core technical infrastructure in many places for them is old. Especially computer controlled train operations have to be introduced in many places.
Upgrading this takes a decade or more and this process is very expensive and will cause even more delays during the update phase. It will partly get worse, before it gets better.
For example the high-speed connection between Hamburg and Berlin (roughly every 30 minutes ICE trains travel in both directions) will be upgraded during the next two years and there will be longer travel times for several months.
Upgrading the major train stations is also very difficult, since most of them are in the center of already dense cities. Here in Hamburg one of the important ICE train stations (Altona, where several ICE trains are starting) will be moved to a new place in the city (a few km apart). The train station then will no longer be a terminus (trains now enter/leave only in one direction), which will improve travel times. Cost will be more than 0.5 billion Euros.
One factor which also makes upgrading the infrastructure difficult is the very low unemployment rate, which makes it difficult to find trained workers...