A presentation by the Bavarian Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Transport (StMB) about expansion plans for the Nuremberg S-Bahn includes several branches to be electrified. Naturally, the presentation includes costs and distances. However, dividing the cost by the distance has little hope of giving us the normal electrification costs in Germany, because all of these projects include other things as well. This is typical of line-by-line electrification: it comes as part of a modernization plan, and the headline cost will include other items, which may be signaling, double-tracking, station upgrades, bridge and tunnel modification, and junction upgrades...
I bring these numbers up not to argue that electrification in Germany costs 5 million €/km, but rather than electrification in Germany is usually bundled with other projects that end up costing that in total. When lines are electrified one at a time, the reason one might electrify in a country where half the network is already wired is that one might want to upgrade specific lines, and then usually the upgrades include multiple things at once.
In that sense, it’s not too different from some past electrification projects, some going back to the invention of the modern S-Bahn in Munich and Paris, as I recounted in the history sections in this post. The Ligne de Vincennes was unelectrified when it ran to Bastille, and first ran electric service at the same time it opened as a partly tunneled line to Nation. Similarly, in Munich, most of the S-Bahn branch network was unelectrified, and was wired as part of the suite of projects completed within the seven-year span that it took to build the system. And yet, one should never apportion the cost of the RER or Stammstrecke tunnels to the cost of surface electrification. It’s important to understand the costs of these projects separately, in order to be able to benchmark them for future urban S-Bahn projects and project costs based on the exact amounts of new tunnel and surface electrification required.
