photo: Archives/Railway
The German Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) has prepared a report on the infrastructural measures that are required to move to a timetable for passenger trains nationwide. This timetable provides for the movement of trains at half-hour and hourly intervals between all major cities of the country. The goal is to double the volume of long-distance passenger traffic by 2030.
In total, the report lists 181 infrastructure projects with a total cost of approximately 40 billion euros. These projects should form the basis of the federal plan for the development of railways until 2030. Some of them are already being implemented.
In recent years, the German government has been stepping up investments in the maintenance and development of the railway network. In 2021, 8.5 billion euros were allocated for these purposes (against 7.6 billion a year earlier), and in 2022, for the first time, more funds will be allocated from the budget to the railways than to the development of highways. The federal states receive from the country's budget 9.3 billion euros annually for the implementation of regional rail transport, and until 2031 it is planned to increase this amount by 1.8% annually. In addition, the annual investment in local rail transport will increase manifold - from 330 million to 2 billion euros in 2025.
Yet Germany still lags far behind many European countries in terms of per capita investment in railways.
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