The freight transport subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn likes to be cheeky on social media.

In the short message service Twitter, the self-description is: "Official account of those who have made you stand at the railway barrier for so long".

A few days ago, the DB Cargo social media team posted the following finding: "Better freight transport than bad sex".

Thiemo Heeg

Editor in business.

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The saying could be cool if rail freight transport were only halfway attractive at the moment. The opposite is the case. Those who supposedly block the railway barrier are stuck in a traffic jam themselves. “This is a full drama. What's going on at the moment: an absolute disaster. I have never seen it before, and I've been with the railroad for 30 years, ”says Sven Flore, CEO of SBB Cargo International.

The freight train operator, which is majority owned by the Swiss Federal Railways, is the largest provider of transalpine rail freight transport with a market share of 43 percent.

The company operates in the so-called north-south or Rhine-Alps corridor, bringing thousands of containers from the large North Sea ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam to Germany and northern Italy.

Swiss precision is important: “Smooth processes guaranteed”, that's the promise.

If the Germans weren't in the way.

“In a good week we will be running around 730 trains.

We are currently losing masses of trains due to the complete collapse of the German infrastructure.

In the past two to three weeks, this has resulted in a drop in sales of around 15 to 17 percent, ”reports company boss Flore, and his anger about it is reflected in the tone of the voice.

"Traffic has almost come to a standstill"

The SBB offshoot is by no means the only one affected.

Last Tuesday, eight international industrial associations sent a fire letter to EU transport commissioner Adina Vălean, the managing transport minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) and his designated successor Volker Wissing (FDP) as well as to DB network boss Frank Sennhenn.

"We turn to you to express our grave concern about the extent, severity and duration of the disruptions we have been exposed to on the German rail network for the past two weeks," it reads.

The disruptions, in connection with the insufficient provision of alternative capacities, had the result that "rail freight traffic in and through Germany on the main corridors has almost come to a standstill".

That might not be that bad if Germany weren't the most important goods transit country in Europe. Around half of the European rail corridors - including the Rhine-Alpine Corridor as the most important of all - lead through the Federal Republic. If something goes wrong here, the entire system gets out of step, and that for days. It's like an assembly line: a malfunction at one point and the entire production comes to a standstill. The neighboring German countries are also feeling this painfully. The Belgian provider Lineas, which emerged from the state railway SNCB / NMBS, did not even get into Germany with its freight. “Last week, many trains had to stop due to disruptions at the German border. We had to park 17 trains between Liège and Aachen. Belgium was full of train wagonsthe Netherlands too, ”says Lineas boss Geert Pauwels.

The industry knows too well how this traffic chaos comes about. It is due to the high utilization of the network, combined with the many construction sites with which the German infrastructure manager, the Deutsche Bahn subsidiary DB Netz, is trying to mend a long-neglected infrastructure. A record sum of 12.7 billion euros will go into the modernization, maintenance, construction and expansion of tracks, switches, bridges and stations in 2021.

The freight railways welcome this, but they also know that one disruption or one employee is enough to bring traffic to a standstill. “In Mülheim a signal system failed on November 15th, it took 16 hours before this could be regulated and the traffic was back to normal. In Duisburg there was a point fault on November 23, which lasted even 24 hours. And if an interlocking employee falls ill, there will always be disruptions in traffic for hours, ”complains Dirk Stahl, head of the train operator BLS Cargo and president of the ERFA rail freight association. The industry sees the network company of Deutsche Bahn have an obligation: They have to coordinate construction sites better, agree internationally, offer alternative routes, deploy more staff.

The DB itself is officially relaxed.

“With up to 1000 construction sites per day, bottlenecks in the network cannot be ruled out.

It goes without saying that we are in close contact with our freight transport customers in order to find short-term solutions, ”says a spokeswoman.

They remain skeptical - and see the whole thing as a structural problem.

"Forming a dynamic, customer-oriented team out of the DB Netz monopoly force, that won't happen overnight," believes SBB manager Flore - and points to better infrastructure conditions in neighboring countries: "The Swiss and Austrians are good, the Italians too.

Isn't it a shame that Germans don't do their job? "