The planned 50-hour warning strike at Deutsche Bahn has been cancelled. © Daniel Karmann/dpa
Not all rail customers will be able to travel as usual after the warning strike was cancelled at the beginning of the week, but most trains are running according to plan. However, this does not necessarily apply to smaller competitors of Deutsche Bahn.
Frankfurt/Berlin - After the cancellation of a two-day warning strike, trains are running largely as planned on Monday morning, according to Deutsche Bahn. The operation had "largely started according to plan," said a railway spokesman.
Thousands of employees were contacted at short notice over the weekend in order to fill as many shifts as possible as quickly as possible. In long-distance traffic, around 90 percent of the planned trains would run on Monday. Travelers should find out which trains are running. Regional and S-Bahn services are running largely without strike-related restrictions.
However, because the EVG union is negotiating collective agreements not only with Deutsche Bahn, but also with smaller competitors, there are restrictions at some private companies. In the Munich area, for example, the Bayerische Oberlandbahn and the Meridian company are affected, in Brandenburg the Ostdeutsche Eisenbahn and in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt the operator Abellio is affected.
Strike surprisingly cancelled
At the weekend, Deutsche Bahn announced that a third of the planned long-distance trains would not run on Monday. Only from Tuesday would all ICE and IC trains be on the road as planned. As a reason for the limited offer on Monday, the railway called the difficult organization: Around 50,000 journeys in long-distance and local transport would have to be re-clocked with the shift and deployment schedules. Some of the wagons and locomotives would have to be moved to new locations. According to Deutsche Bahn, restrictions are still to be expected in freight traffic on Monday and Tuesday.
The warning strike was scheduled to start at 22:00 on Sunday and end at 24:00 on Tuesday. The EDC surprisingly cancelled the strike on Saturday. Previously, there had been an agreement in the collective bargaining dispute with the railways under the mediation of the labor court in Frankfurt am Main, which will now be the basis for further collective bargaining. The collective bargaining round affects 230,000 employees. 180,000 of them work for Deutsche Bahn. Dpa