EU, Germany to Accelerate Rail Investment in Response to Iran War

As the American war on Iran led Iran to close the Straits of Hormuz, taking 20% of global oil deliveries offline, the German government and the EU have both promised that they are going to implement short- and long-term measures to reduce oil consumption and the national security risks it involves. These include investment in electric vehicles and German and European infrastructure packages on public transportation to reduce the extent of driving. Sources close to Chancellor Friedrich Merz added that even if the war is resolved soon and oil deliveries resume, the long-term package will reduce Russia’s oil and gas export revenues and improve European security.

In Germany, deficit spending will be used; members of the SPD left assure the coalition that there will be a two-thirds majority for it as Die Linke is opposed to the Iran war and supportive of both the green transition and visible decoupling from the American-led world order, and the Greens have long been supportive of such investments. The package is said to total 100 billion € in capital construction for urban, regional, and intercity rail, and negotiations are ongoing over the split, with the coalition insisting that nearly all money be spent on U- and S-Bahn extensions including future park-and-rides with electric vehicle charging stations and on high-speed rail lines and negotiators for the Greens demanding more money for regional trains and trams. The Greens’ working group on transportation insists on prioritizing regional trains, since the point of the program is to provide alternatives to the car where the current quality is too low, rather than to make already strong intercity lines stronger.

At the EU level, a package will be used to construct high-speed rail on the core cross-border lines in Western and Central Europe; farther east, financing for member state-led projects will be made available with member states choosing their own priorities, which can even be about issues other than transportation. The highest-priority lines are said to be Utrecht-Rhine-Ruhr, a connection from the LGV Est to Saarbrücken and Frankfurt via Metz and to Karlsruhe and Stuttgart via Strasbourg, completion of high-speed rail across the gaps in Belgium, an acceleration of construction of the connecting high-speed lines on the German and Austrian side of the Brenner Base Tunnel, an acceleration of the remaining gap from Perpignan to the rest of the TGV network, a new line from Bordeaux and Dax to Irún and the Spanish network, and a connection from Berlin to Poznań and the under-construction Polish network toward Warsaw. The German government assures the EU Commission that its own package will include a Berlin-Dresden connection to link with the base tunnel to be built to Czechia, where the Czech network will connect from it to Prague and the rest of the country.

The total cost of all of these lines at the EU level is said to be 50 billion €, but the package is expected to be much larger to include electric vehicle infrastructure and grants to the cohesion countries. Hungary may be included with especial subsidies in the event Péter Magyar wins the election this month, in order to provide him with more economic legitimacy, in which case a program connecting Budapest with the major secondary cities of Hungary as well as Bratislava and Vienna will be announced, a total of 600 km of Hungarian construction at what is estimated to cost 20 billion €.

16 comments

  2. Matthew Hutton's avatar
    Matthew Hutton

    I know this is an April fools joke, but every time I’ve suggested anything concrete in this regard it’s been suggested as impossible.

    And pretty much always what I have suggested is better using the existing infrastructure.

    Reply
    • Matthew Hutton's avatar
      Matthew Hutton

      I mean we are still in a world where the last cross border train from Spain to France leaves Barcelona at 16:24, and the first the other way goes at a now earlier 11:12. Probably both are 5 hours earlier/later than they should be if you’re serious.

      Reply
      • Matthew Hutton's avatar
        Matthew Hutton

        OK and from Barcelona to Perpignan you have a gap between 09:30 and 16:30 with no service. And arguably between 13:00 and 18:00.

        They built a cross border high speed line for this and are literally running a massively worse service than Glasgow – Fort William or Inverness – Thurso.

        Reply
      • Matthew Hutton's avatar
        Matthew Hutton

        OK and from Barcelona to Perpignan you have a gap between 09:30 and 16:30 with no service. And arguably between 13:00 and 18:00 the other way.

        They built a cross border high speed line for this and are literally running a massively worse service than Glasgow – Fort William or Inverness – Thurso.

        Reply
  3. aquaticko's avatar
    aquaticko

    Yes, I did forget about April Fool’s Day, and read this straight. No, I’m not sad about it.

    Reply
  4. Basil Marte's avatar
    Basil Marte

    Who would plan and oversee the investments into Hungary?

    Serious question. The second-to-last major rail project was Budapest metro M4, an honorary Anglosphere metro by cost, due to:

    • 100% bored tunnel alignment;
    • dense station spacing (three pairs of stations are less than 400 m from each other);
    • largely mined stations;
    • the stations being long, because the trains are long (100 m) and not immensely frequent, despite being ZPTO and having been planned to be that from the start;
    • corruption.

    The latest major project is the Budapest-Belgrade high speed freight railway, which:

    • is built from a Chinese loan, as an ideological choice of the current government;
    • is supposed to speed up the flow of Chinese imports into Europe after they arrive into Pireus by sea;
      • goods which just spent weeks at sea, so they evidently aren’t so time-sensitive they couldn’t land at Rotterdam instead and e.g. use the Betuweroute;
      • goods which first need to make their way across Greece, Bulgaria/Macedonia, and Serbia, with their difficult terrain;
    • is certainly not supposed to benefit passengers, since the chosen route is very sparsely populated (unlike the alternative);
    • stub-ends into Budapest, where all other radial lines are packed with passenger traffic;
    • is substantially complete in trackwork (the successful 176 km/h test run for 160 km/h line speed has been announced) but the signaling system is very much unfinished;
    • has a highly obvious alternative route, Budapest-Cegléd-Kecskemét-Szeged, with the following properties:
      • Budapest-Cegléd is probably the highest-traffic segment in the country, and capacity would benefit greatly from four-tracking, be that within-RoW or greenfield paralleling;
      • speed improvements would be shared by passengers continuing elsewhere (including Szolnok, Debrecen, Békéscsaba, and points beyond them);
      • the full Bp-Szeged route already has substantial passenger traffic;
      • for that matter, keys perfectly into a freight improvement schema;
    • exhibited very obvious corruption (the PM’s strawman, Lőrinc Mészáros, a former plumber, owns the prime contractor IIRC).

    The system very clearly doesn’t do integrated schedule-rollingstock-infrastructure planning. It seems not to even plan individual categories. For instance, the state of rolling stock, by segment:

    • Commuter: largely Stadler EMUs, but still with significant presence of refurbished (and for that matter unrefurbished) legacy coaches, which fairly often but by no means always work in push-pull sets. (Read: the equipment for push working has ridiculously poor reliability, below 90%.)
    • Long distance: apart from “visiting” ÖBB Railjets, and the commuter EMUs sometimes being drafted into this role due to vehicle shortages, everything is locomotive-pulled coaches. No attempt is made at push-pull working. Coaches are rearranged on a daily basis, with subsequent trains of the same takt being of unequal lengths. (I understand serviceability is so low as to necessitate this on its own; on my commute, I run into non-functioning powered doors on coaches often enough that I’d estimate 1%+ is out of order at any one time. Strangely, the doors on the EMUs are at least two orders of magnitude more reliable.) In addition to various quantitative shortages, the qualitative picture also breaks down poorly:
      • “gyorsvonat 2nd class”, where “gyorsvonat” is the old way to say Rx/IR. The majority of the fleet by numbers, these coaches lack air conditioning, power outlets, and other features expected in 21st century Europe. 3rd class should be reintroduced and these coaches demoted to it, just to clear away some intentional confusion.
      • “IC 2nd class”: coaches that would pass muster. However, since the same long-distance trains have travel demand at multiple classes of travel, they end up carrying both “IC 2nd” and “gyorsvonat 2nd” classes, which is annoying. Inevitably they overall get designated as IC, which is another misclassification: Hungary is too small (and Budapest centrally located) for Bp-Anything to be IC rather than Rx/IR. An IC would have to run through Bp (annoying with the legacy termini), bypass Bp (where, exactly? The one Danube railway bridge outside Bp is flanked by tens of km of unelectrified single track on both sides), or continue across some border and become an EC. Or run a circuit: Bp(Nyugati)-Cegléd-Szolnok-Debrecen-Nyíregyháza-Miskolc-Hatvan-Bp(Keleti).
      • “IC 1st”: bigger seats, but otherwise starts being an overclaim. For example, (I think) the wifi usually works in the sense that a passengers’s laptop can connect to it, but MÁV has not built lineside comms infrastructure for the coach to connect to…
      • “IC 1+”: I smell headline-oriented top-down meddling, since other than increasing the space per seat (compartments for 4, not 6 as in 1st and 8 in 2nd), there is zero customer service vision behind this.
      • There is no presence anywhere of up-to-date features, such as child/family compartments, quiet zones, layouts other than conventional compartments or Grossraumwagen (except one commuter coach refurbishment program, very strictly speaking), catering from vending machines rather than staffed positions, etc.
    • Branch line: I hope you like the Studenka Bzmot. Spare parts supply? Funny you should ask. Carrying travel class visions through the network, across vehicles? Where, in Hungary?
    • Locomotive: by the last years, the mainstay of the electric fleet, the V43 class has started falling apart to the point that an emergency mass leasing of Vectrons and Tauruses has taken place. Interestingly, they seem to mostly be registered to MÁV Rail Tours, the in-house excursion/heritage train operator, not the regular TOC.

    But apart from that, some projects:

    • Budapest S-Bahn tunnel, Kelenföld-Nyugati. (Notice how M4 is a track pair running Kelenföld-Keleti, but not able to be interoperated in either direction.)
    • Breaking with the Soviet “heavy metro and/or bust” approach, Budapest M5 a Stadtbahn connecting the Csepel HÉV and Ráckeve HÉV (at the southern end) with the Szentendre HÉV, and probably a few tram-mode surface branches. (The existing HÉVs are surface-running and not sufficiently separated from crossings at grade to legally count as anything other than a tram.)
    • A few metro extensions, such as the as yet unbuilt northern segment of the M3 that the whole Káposztásmegyer area was built to orient to. (Two cut-and-cover stations from the current terminus to Rákospalota-Újpest rwy station, then taking over the surface grade-separated RoW that a tram had been using “temporarily”.)
    • Incidentally, Rákospalota-Újpest is on the Bp-Vác line (the connection toward Bratislava, and the initial Bp-Vienna route), upgraded to 160 km/h line speed and most stations upgraded to 21st century standards, more or less. Except this one, which still has <1 m narrow, railhead+lolno “platforms”, and thus passengers alighting from / boarding the Bp->Vác trains cross the tracks of the Vác->Bp trains at grade.
    • Connecting M2 with the Gödöllő HÉV. These two heavy rail systems terminate opposite each other, forcing passengers to transfer through the underpass below the road intersection. (The numerous streetlight-“protected” grade crossings on the HÉV are the sticking point, previous attempts repeatedly scope-creeped to all-elevated, then to all-tunneled, then to the wastebasket for being unaffordable.)
    • Potential greenfield HSR:
      • Bp(Kőbánya-Kispest)-Cegléd(?)-Kecskemét/Szolnok, as mentioned above as the sensible alternative to the Belgrade line. Further segments are on flat enough terrain and uncongested enough that they can be usefully upgraded in place.
      • Bp(Kelenföld)-Tatabánya, heavily tunneled due to terrain. Bypass the very curvy and high-traffic segment. Further segments (Komárom-Győr-Vienna/Sopron) are flat.
      • “Bp”(Fót?)-Aszód, heavily tunneled. The line to Hatvan-Miskolc both makes a detour toward Gödöllő, and is very curvy due to the hills. If we cut it off with tunneling, it makes more sense for it to run into Nyugati rather than Keleti (as it currently does).
    Reply
    • Matthew Hutton's avatar
      Matthew Hutton

      To be fair the road route from Budapest to Istanbul goes via Belgrade so I am not sure a higher speed line from Budapest to Belgrade is bad?

      Reply
      • Basil Marte's avatar
        Basil Marte

        Railfreight toward Turkey currently largely moves via Romania (border crossing at Lőkösháza) on the Cegléd-Szolnok-Békéscsaba-Arad(RO) line.

        If the new line is for passenger use, it is still hopelessly confused:

        • That line is not associated with a legacy terminus in Budapest, instead joining onto the ring* railway. Trains approaching would have to make 180° hooks into either Kelenföld or Kőbánya-Kispest (important junction stations well outside city center, the ends of metro lines M4 and M3 respectively), or bramble about on the ring to legacy terminus Keleti (which they will in fact do).
        • As laid out in the OP, this line does Budapest-Belgrade and nothing else. Whereas for very similar cost, the alternative would:
          • provide capacity relief (more frequent commuter service on Budapest-Cegléd),
          • directly serve domestic destinations (Szeged 240k 7th and Kecskemét 187k 9th), whereas the actually built project touches no intermediate settlement large enough to be worth stopping at (the largest being Kiskunhalas 26k),
          • speed up other journeys diverging off from the shared trunk segment, namely Debrecen 326k 2nd, Nyíregyháza 235k 8th, Szolnok 11th, Békéscsaba 16th, Arad (RO), Oradea (RO), whereas the actually built project isn’t a trunk with several mainlines(!) diverging from it, it’s just a point-to-point line.
        Reply
        • Matthew Hutton's avatar
          Matthew Hutton

          So does this mean the Hungarian ultra “nationalist” guy did the route the citizens of nowhere thought was best (i.e redoing the orient express) and not what makes sense for Hungary itself?

          That is nearly as funny as a far right video I saw about asylum seekers where they were outraged they got unbranded shoes, water and to sit on clean wooden benches.

          Reply
          • Basil Marte's avatar
            Basil Marte

            Yes, exactly.

            Why would they have an appreciation of mass transit, given that they are culturally/ideologically low-trust, and in any case popular in rural areas but unpopular in cities? Also personalist, while good transit is naturally institutional — but this is weaker that the previous.

            To go into more detail, the “nationalist” thing is quite weird. It stands for several things:

            • Focusing on ethnonationalism at the expense of the state. They gave members of the Hungarian diaspora the right to vote in Hungarian elections even if they never lived in Hungary and never paid a forint in taxes to it. (Charitably, they should be a voluntary-membership church, or country club, or something similar.)
            • Opposing international cooperation in general — for instance, they rail against “multinational companies extracting/exporting profit” frequently. (Here remember that Hungary has fewer than 10 million residents.) Occasionally they take this unhingedly far, e.g. they have used “we will not be a colony” as a campaign slogan in the past. Specific attention is reserved for members and institutions of the status quo coalition, first among them the EU. Their chosen label for the SQC is “globalists” — note the form of the word implying that it describes some group of people (“good monkey beat bad monkey”) rather than shared interests.
            • Thinking not in terms of states having interests and relations with other states, but governments (in democracies: parties) having interests and relations with other governments.
            • As a corollary of the previous, proudly talking of their international cooperation (huh?) with other self-appointed opponents of the status quo coalition, both internal (similar “nationalist” parties in other members, from Farage and Le Pen to Slovakia’s Fico — even though in the past these guys clashed with Fico because, unsurprisingly, Slovakian ultranationalists are hostile to the Hungarian diaspora living there) and external (China and Russia). This despite Hungary’s (as state) interests lying with the SQC, and as a former Warsaw Pact member, being on Russia’s wishlist for conquest/vassalization.

            They are also at least skeptical of markets in general. These guys brag about nationalizing utilities, about heavily subsidizing/regulating retail prices, and about factories being built because the minister of foreign affairs negotiated deals with Chinese companies/diplomats.

  5. Onux's avatar
    Onux

    Why Frankfurt-Saarbrucken-Metz? If you are doing Strasbourg-Karlsruhe to get to Stuttgart then why not just Frankfurt-Stuttgart-Strasbourg to get to LGV Est and Paris?

    Frankfurt to Metz is ~269km of new track through the Vosges/Palatine Forest, while Frankfurt to Karlsruhe is 137km down the Rhine Valley. Why double your track distance and more than double your cost due to the mountains? You want a HSR Frankfut to Karlsruhe anyway for the access to Switzerland/N. Italy. There is nothing particularly special about Saarbrucken/Metz; Karlsruhe and Strasbourg have a 50% greater urban population and approximately equal metro pop. Karlsruhe is the seat of German judicial governance (all the high courts) and Strasbourg is a European Capital (although not as prominent as Brussels) so it would seem there would be a lot more demand along that axis than through two third tier cities.

    Overall trip Frankfurt-Paris should be ~607km via Saarbrucken/Metz and 676km via Strasbourg. At LGV Est average speeds that is ~18 min difference, with both trips being a little less than 3 hours. Is it worth building 132km of “extra” track and bypass two more prominent destinations to save 18 min?

    If you are looking for a more direct path from Germany to France, why not take the bull by the horns and go Frankfurt-Luxembourg-Rheims (with trains from Cologne/Rhine-Rhur joining at Mainz) or Cologne-Leige-Charleroi-LGV Nord south of Lille (Leige-Namur-Charleroi-Mons is a natural axis, geographic/demographic/political that picks up a large portion of the population of Wallonia and its capital).

    Reply
    • Matthew Hutton's avatar
      Matthew Hutton

      You want a HSR Frankfut to Karlsruhe anyway for the access to Switzerland/N. Italy.

      And almost the whole way for Frankfurt-Stuttgart.

      Reply
      • Onux's avatar
        Onux

        Frankfurt-Stuttgart uses the Mannheim-Stuttgart high speed line, which bypasses Karlsruhe, but Frankfurt-Mannheim is planned for 2030, and yes, that gets you 2/3 of the way to Karlsruhe.

        Reply
    • Onux's avatar
      Onux

      “why not just Frankfurt-Stuttgart-Strasbourg to get to LGV Est and Paris?” should obviously be “why not just Frankfurt-Karlsruhe-Strasbourg to get to LGV Est and Paris?”

      Reply

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