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.

The lines in question are as follows:

1. Neustadt an der Aisch to Steinach bei Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a 30 km line. The cost of the project is 142 million €, including electrification, 8.3 km of noise barriers, and alignment modifications at the two ends of the section. This is expected to reduce trip times by 14 minutes and raise ridership by 2,000 riders/day, for a cost per new rider of 71,000€ and a benefit-cost ratio of 1.1.
2. Forchheim-Ebermannstadt, a 16 km line. The cost of the project is 72 million €, including electrification, signal modification, and new platforms at six stations. This is expected to raise ridership by 600 riders/day, reducing trip times by 2 minutes, for a cost per new rider of 120,000€ and, despite the high cost, a benefit-cost ratio of 1.1 as well.
3. Bamberg-Ebern, an 18 km line. The cost of the project is 89 million €, including electrification, 1.6 km of noise barriers, a new interlocking system, and new platforms at a station and extensions at two others. This is expected to shortern trip times by 8 minutes and raise ridership by 1,100 riders/day, for a cost per new rider of 81,000€ and a benefit-cost ratio of 2.5.
4. Express S-Bahn to Markt Erlbach. This 165 million € project involves electrifying and speeding up 18 km of route, double-tracking about 7 km of the route, 4.6 km of noise barriers, interlocking improvements, and train platform improvements. Expected benefits include a trip time reduction of 20 minutes and 2,000 new riders, for a benefit-cost ratio of 1.2.

It’s worth noting that the benefit-cost ratios vary widely relative to costs per rider. This is partly about distance traveled – the third project is expected to reduce car traffic by somewhat more than the others relative to the number of new riders; that said, the factor is not 2 but rather 1.2, and the first two projects have rather similar projected reductions in car traffic per new rider to each other.

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.

The difference is that in these cases, the costs available to us are already bundled. This is because electrifying an 18 km branch line in the Nuremberg suburbs is not a sufficiently large project to merit extensive debate all by itself. The goal of improving the line is important enough to be mentioned as a line item in a presentation about investment plans, and will include the total bundled costs, but there’s no real sense that one can disaggregate these costs to try to cut some secondary scope, not at this scale.

For benchmarking, it is therefore better to look at much larger electrification schemes, precisely because they’re large enough by themselves to be disaggregated from others. Israel and Denmark are both good case studies for this, because they’re electrifying large sections of their intercity and regional rail networks all at once, as part of a program of investment in the national network rather than in specific lines, and therefore disaggregated costs are available. In Israeli discourse, the contract with the electrification contractor is a point of controversy in the media (in fact, acrimony led the state to fire the contractor, each side blaming the other for delays), because it’s a big contract and can be discussed separately from other contracts, for rolling stock, resignaling, the Haifa trenching project, and other elements. In German discourse, no such thing can happen, because there is no large-scale effort to electrify hundreds of kilometers all at once, and instead people are interested in studying the upgrade program line by line or region by region, in which discourse the aggregated costs per line are more important than the overall cost of multi-line electrification versus those of other elements.