### Reader’s Letter to The Guardian, 15th July 2024 ###
Dear Editor,
I read Kate Connolly’s piece on the state of Germany’s railways (The Guardian, 15th July 2024, link below) and strongly agree.
Years of under-investment (partly caused by botched and patchy attempts to privatise the network in the early 2000s) have left the service in a real mess which is tragic, especially when I compare this to my first experiences of Deutsche Bahn traveling on Interrail in the 1970s.
However, there is one central technical issue which needs to be highlighted: This is the fact that “high-speed” trains travel at 300km/h which, for fear of derailment, is too fast to pass over points making it imperative to remove switchover-points. In one conversation I had with train-staff, they mentioned that, prior to the era of high-speed (i.e. ICE-trains), there were switch-over points every four or five kilometres. This mean that lines never needed to be closed: Maintenance crews would simply work on one of the lines, while trains crossed over for a few kilometres before switching back.
Of course this does not work for high-speed where long stretches of track need to be shut down for maintenance. As is now the case between Frankfurt and Mannheim.
Classic-style trains go at close to 200km/h, which is still pretty fast and so prompts the central question which is whether “high-speed” is really worth having at all? Why not have cheaper, less hi-tech, more reliable, slightly slower, higher-capacity trains … rather than complicated, expensive prestige-objects which continually break down?* And then, for longer routes, lay on comfortable night-trains.
None of this is rocket-science and, indeed, in a referendum in the 1980s Switzerland chose “high-density” rather than “high-speed” which, at the end of the day, makes their service far more efficient than Germany’s.
*: If the response here is to say “so that rail- can complete with plane- travel”, then I would say we should tax (and regulate) those planes out of the sky and use the revenue earned to provide more capacity and more reliability in the rail-network.
Yours,
Alan Mitcham
Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/15/germany-close-key-rail-corridor-overhaul-train-network-deutsche-bahn
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