Frozen in ICE: How Can Germany's High-Speed Trains Get Back on Track?

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The city protested, afraid it would end up cut off completely from ICE traffic. Then-CEO of Deutsche Bahn Hartmut Mehdorn added fuel to the fire by declaring that "not every little place" could be included. As it happens, he was absolutely correct, but the debate spun out of control to the point that it was no longer possible to implement a rational solution.

"It has long since stopped actually being about finding reasonable solutions for Mannheim that make sense in terms of transportation and operation. It's become solely about preventing the bypass," criticizes Sven Andersen, one of the best-informed chroniclers of Germany's railway plight.

A retired Deutsche Bahn engineer and now the author of numerous publications on the topic, Andersen sees even more trouble brewing in the same region. Darmstadt, for example, a small city between Mannheim and Frankfurt, will also receive an ICE station as part of the planned corridor -- most likely without a bypass route. Even trains that don't stop in Darmstadt will have to reduce speed because here, as in Mannheim, the track passes directly through the city and the main train station.

Another stumbling block is Frankfurt itself. Original plans had Deutsche Bahn expanding the city's South Station into a hub. The station is located south of the Main River, as is the airport train station, and yet is close to the city center. Roland Heinisch, then head of track infrastructure for Deutsch Bahn, expressed clear support for this solution early in the decade.

Frittering Away Travel Time

Opposing the idea is Frankfurt's city government under Mayor Petra Roth of the Christian Democratic Union. She wants to keep the hub at the city's main station, a cumbersome terminus north of the Main that requires trains to change direction on their way back out.

It looks like Roth will prevail in the matter, which means Frankfurt remains a veritable brake on the speed of all trains passing through the city. The journey from Cologne to Würzburg, Nuremberg and Munich requires crossing the Main four times on low-speed stretches of tracks, frittering away a good half hour of travel time. The same amount of time, on open track, could be used to cover 150 kilometers (90 miles).

In Andersen's view, the city of Lyon in southern France provides a perfect model of the solution for Frankfurt. There too, the existing main train station proved unsuitable for high-speed TGV service. Instead, Part Dieu, a secondary station close to the city center, was expanded to accommodate long-distance travel. A bypass route was also constructed for trains that don't stop in Lyon.

The current state of the Stuttgart-Frankfurt project, meanwhile, offers the opposite to such intelligent routing decisions: no bypasses, pointless stops in Darmstadt and a grotesque waste of travel time in and around Frankfurt.

If things turn out the way he fears, concludes DB critic Andersen, "we might as well just go ahead and quit developing high-speed rail transportation in Germany entirely, right now."

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• Part 1: How Can Germany's High-Speed Trains Get Back on Track?
• Part 2: Rocket or Snail?
• Part 3: Fuel to the Fire