First a Corona brake, then a nine-euro boost for the Southeast Bavarian Railway

Created: 06/01/2022, 06:00

By: Timo Aichele

The three managing directors (from left): Magdalena Obermayer (human resources, controlling and purchasing), Matthias Krause (spokesman; transport company, workshop and marketing) and Christian Steinbacher (infrastructure).

© Southeast Bavaria Railway

Extra trains and more staff: After the pandemic, the Southeast Bavarian Railway faces new challenges.

Dorfen

– vacation by train – starting today, Wednesday, this is a cheap pleasure inland, but will it also be fun to travel?

Depending on the destination, journeys with the nine-euro ticket require patience.

The Southeast Bavarian Railway (SOB) has been preparing for weeks.

Those responsible expect massive growth, especially in the leisure sector.

"The demand was brutal," reports Matthias Krause, spokesman for the management, in the SOB annual press conference.

He does not share fears that overloaded trains could become negative publicity for the railways.

"That's a great signal," he says of the three-month tariff.

The company based in Mühldorf has "founded a small project team" for this purpose, reports employee Sarah Wagner.

The expected rush will be intercepted with train reinforcements - continuously on the Munich-Mühldorf route as well as on weekends and public holidays in the direction of Salzburg.

The Austrian city is a German "tariff point" and can therefore be reached with local trains for nine euros.

Salzburg is conveniently located on the SOB route: the journey from Dorfen takes two hours, change in Mühldorf.

For a nine-euro trip to Berlin, on the other hand, stamina is required.

From Dorfen you can reach the capital in eleven hours and five changes.

The travel time to Legoland Günzburg is 3:36 hours.

If you left Dorfen at 8:54 a.m. on Sunday, you would be there at 12:30 p.m.

But mom and dad would have to manage three times with the children.

On the Salzburg route, capacity will be doubled at the weekend.

And in the direction of Munich, “we drive Oktoberfest traffic at the weekend,” explains Krause.

The challenge often lies behind the scenes.

"We have a lot of maintenance at night," explains the manager.

Additional shifts are being worked in the workshop, and more cleaning staff and service employees are needed as “pilots”.

In order not to end up on the busiest trains as a day tripper, Krause recommends asking the SOB customer dialog (e-mail sob-kundendialog@deutschebahn.com or Tel. (0 86 31) 60 93 33. Especially when traveling with the Bicycles are valuable: "Perhaps you shouldn't necessarily go on main trains, but drive a little anti-cyclically. You can't reserve, but we make recommendations."

Krause is optimistic about the nine-euro months.

"It's a huge opportunity.

As a railway, we like to make advance payments and want to present ourselves well," he says.

So the next three months will be anything but normal for the SOB.

But the company has just come out of a completely different exceptional situation.

Passenger demand is still around 60 percent compared to the pre-Corona level in 2019, when almost 36,000 passengers used the Southeast Bavarian Railway.

On the Mühldorf–Munich main route, it is currently 51 percent and on the branch lines 71 percent.

"The commuter who drives five days a week will not be that common anymore," says Krause about the development towards more home office fueled by the pandemic.

At the same time, the need for mobility and travel will increase.

“But the market will change.

We are the solution to the climate problem,” explains the SOB manager confidently.

"Now there is a generation growing up with public transport in the country."

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The tasks of the SOB are more diverse than most companies in the privatized railway market.

“We are exotic on the train.

We combine infrastructure and transport operations in local transport,” explains Krause.

Technicians in the workshop are just as much a part of the staff as train drivers and dispatchers.

The current shortage of skilled workers is also a problem for the SOB with its 914 employees.

When it comes to training, the Corona period, in which contact with schools suffered, is still having an effect, reported Magdalena Obermayer, Head of Human Resources, Controlling and Purchasing.

"We're in a lot of competition there," says Krause.

Society has changed, he says.

It's not always easy to get people excited about a job in a 24-hour, seven days a week operation.

Here the SOB is making great efforts to become even more attractive as an employer, adds Christian Steinbacher, manager for infrastructure.

"We have to get to the employment conditions," he says.

Obermayer confirms that shift work enables unusual holiday models to improve the work-life balance, for example.

There is also a lot of freight traffic on the 420-kilometer SOB route with 78 of its own transport stations, 419 level crossings and 310 railway bridges.

But this is precisely where the economy is currently complaining.

"We are aware that we operate the lifeline in the chemical triangle," explains Steinbacher.

But here you have to make a distinction.

While the SOB handles the regional inter-works transport itself, the company only has a limited influence on long-distance runners.

If a container train arrives several days late in the Munich area, the SOB cannot catch up on its own.

"We are the last mile," says Krause.