The railway between Regensburg and Nuremberg, a key section of the Rhine-Danube TEN-T corridor, will be closed for five months for infrastructure upgrades. Due to the lack of valid alternative routes, rail freight companies in Germany are finding themselves in yet another limbo.
The closure will start tonight at midnight and will continue until the summer. The two main alternatives for freight trains are the Würzburg–Nuremberg–Treuchtlingen line and the one through Ansbach. And this is where things get tricky, as the German association of private operators Die Guterbahnen pointed out.
“Last night it was announced that the commissioning of the Ansbach signal box, located on the main diversion route, has to be postponed for the second time”, the association said. Without the new signal box in Ansbach, the diversion route via Treuchtlingen will be highly congested, disrupting traffic to Munich and the rest of Bavaria. “Should a serious incident occur in Ansbach, we see no other option than to postpone the closure of the Nuremberg-Regensburg line until the signal box is operational”, Die Guterbahnen’s managing director Peter Westerberger added.
‘Diversion routes are too fragile’
The association also highlighted how the diversion routes proposed by the German infrastructure manager are too fragile and how operations costs will increase without public support. Moreover, not all the promises made by the DB InfraGO will be kept during the closure of the Regensburg-Nuremberg line, especially regarding rail freight. “For example, the long-announced extensions of passing tracks to a train length of 740 meters will not be carried out during this closure”, Die Guterbahnen underlined. This somewhat adds insult to injury, as rail freight operators will have to struggle during the line closure but will not reap all the benefits.