Deutsche Bahn released a study three days ago proposing to build a Europe-wide network of high-speed trains. There aren’t too many details – the fully study PDF is corrupted – but we can already learn a lot from the proposed map, which is available. I’m glad that proposals like this are out, but this one reminds me of the recent proposal for a massive expansion of the Berlin U-Bahn, which leaves a lot to be desired, comprising both necessary priorities and questionable lines; this time, there are some priorities that should be included but aren’t.
The map is clearly intended as a Europe-wide network. For reasons I don’t quite get, Britain and its under-construction High Speed 2 system is not included – it’s not an EU or Schengen member but neither are Serbia and North Macedonia, and meanwhile, Northern Ireland is included.
In some places, the proposed lines are taken straight out of current proposals. This is the case in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France: on the French map, lines that are in active planning like Bordeaux-Dax and Toulouse-Montpellier/Perpignan are visible and so are lines that are stalled like Marseille-Nice or the Paris-Orléans-Lyon relief line.
There’s little to comment on in these places, save that some of the international connections are underbuilt under current plans. It’s frustrating that the current plans include a connection from Bordeaux to Basque Country and thence Madrid, and a more direct connection from Madrid to Pamplona, but not the short connection from Pamplona to the French border for faster Paris-Madrid service; French and Spanish trains are fast and these two cities, the two largest single-core regions in the EU, should be no more than 4.5 hours apart via the most direct routing. Italy is also, equally frustratingly, missing a fast connection from Milan into Switzerland, hooking into the new tunnels across the Alps with additional under-construction fast lines on the Swiss side; this way, the route from Zurich to Milan has an orphaned-looking fast section in the middle.
In Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, the map looks taken from existing proposals as well. Finland’s system is based on existing proposals. Their benefit-cost ratios were assessed to be underwater earlier this year (using atypically low estimates of the travel time elasticity – Helsinki-Tampere looks like they’re estimating -0.17, which is ridiculous; try -2), but this doesn’t mean they won’t happen. Sweden recently decided against a domestic high-speed rail system, but this again may be revived. Czechia is planning its own system, with international connections. But farther east, the lines get more fanciful – the Romanian and Hungarian networks look pretty overbuilt relative to the sizes of the cities in those countries, which aren’t growing.
And then there’s the German core. The domestic and international lines here mostly look like a very extensive proposal. Practically every city is on the map, to the point that there’s a 300 km/h line from Leipzig to Chemnitz. Some of those yellow lines on the map are already in planning, like Augsburg-Ulm, Hanover-Hamm, and Erfurt-Fulda.
But then there are the missing ones. Fulda-Hanau, currently on the planning board, is for some reason omitted. Berlin is getting two new high-speed rail lines to the south, one to Dresden and a separate one to Görlitz (district population 248,000), but nothing to Halle and Leipzig, even though that would also speed up the trains to Munich. This can’t be about the false belief that a four-hour trip time is good enough and there’s no point in speeding it up further, because then why would they include a spur to Chemnitz? It’s a three-hour trip today with a 40-minute transfer at Leipzig; the time saved from speeding up Leipzig-Chemnitz is less than what could be saved just by timing the connection better, let alone by doing that and also speeding up Berlin-Leipzig.
The international connections are pretty good. There’s finally a fast line to Zurich, plus two to Prague, plus an all-fast connection from Munich south across the Alps. Paris-Frankfurt is on the map, via Mannheim. The slow section to the Belgian border is fixed; the Netherlands gets four distinct connections, of which two I do not get (the three southern ones can be consolidated to one without taking a huge hit to trip times).
But then those international connections mostly just feed existing or planned lines. Thus, the fast line from Munich to the Austrian border is not accompanied by speeding up the Westbahn; Salzburg, per DB, should get fast trains to Munich and the rest of Germany, and Linz should get fast trains via two different lines, but then Vienna should stay connected by a medium-speed link.
And yet, at least in and around Germany, it looks like DB is proposing too much, not too little: cities like Szczecin, Bremerhaven, Kiel, Rostock, Chemnitz, and Görlitz are too small to be worth building a dedicated line to. Either send an ICE at lower speed from the nearest large node or run slow trains and try to time some connections. It’s proposing a 6,000 km network for Germany; I did a fair amount of crayoning in 2021, and got to somewhat more than 4,000, including international connections. The current network, including lines that shouldn’t be changed like Berlin-Hamburg or that are under construction like Karlsruhe-Basel, is around 1,700. So as with the Berlin U-Bahn map, it’s best to think of the current proposal as about half good lines, and half things that most likely shouldn’t see the light of day (Chemnitz, again).
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