Soon also with excess length: an ICE train
Photo: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images
Deutsche Bahn is expanding its range of services between the major cities for the winter timetable in order to compete with the aircraft.
According to SPIEGEL information, it will be using 20 new XXL ICE trains with a length of 13 wagons on the route between Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Hamburg from mid-December.
These can hold almost 1000 passengers, so they replace three short-haul planes, as the railway announces.
The railway also wants to shorten travel times through Sprinter connections.
Between Hamburg and Frankfurt Airport, for example, the journey should only take 3 hours and 45 minutes, 10 minutes less, and between Düsseldorf and Munich it should be even 30 minutes faster at 4 hours 20 minutes.
25 minutes are also saved between Cologne and Berlin.
After the ICs and ICEs drove half empty through the republic for months in the pandemic and caused the state-owned company high losses, the passengers were the last to return.
Reports of overcrowded wagons and travelers sitting on the ground are already piling up.
In order to prevent chaos at Christmas, significantly more trains should run.
However, it is still unclear how the new corona restrictions will affect the number of travelers in the next few weeks.
Around the holidays, the number of seats available increases by 50,000 to 510,000, the acting Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) recently announced.
In addition, the railway plans to use amplifier trains for the days of Christmas traffic.
This brings "several thousand seats a day," said Scheuer.
But more trains should not only run around Christmas.
From the timetable change on December 12, the offer of the railway will increase by eleven percent, it said.
According to the Ministry of Transport, around 63,000 more seats per day will be offered in December 2021 than in December 2019. The rail offer is growing compared not only to the first Corona winter, but also to the pre-Corona period.
New connections between metropolitan areas
Most recently, 300,000 travelers took long-distance trains through Germany and neighboring countries every day.
"This means that in long-distance transport we are already three-quarters of the time in terms of passengers and sales compared to the pre-Corona period in 2019," said DB long-distance transport manager Michael Peterson.
With the expansion of the range of services offered by the railways, domestic flights are to become increasingly superfluous.
That is also a goal of the new traffic light coalition.
Deutsche Bahn and Lufthansa are already cooperating to shift feeder flights to the hubs in Frankfurt and Munich, for example, to rail.
However, the airport in Munich is not connected to the ICE network.
with fww / dpa / afp