From the point of view of several transport associations, the federal and state governments are still making little progress with the reactivation of railway lines that were once closed.
Since the Bundestag elections last year, "not a single kilometer of rail track in Germany" has been reactivated, said Dirk Flege, Managing Director of the Pro-Rail Alliance on Monday in Berlin.
"This is a very sobering signal, also against the background of the coalition agreement, which says unequivocally and without reservation: 'We will reactivate routes.'"
One of the reasons: According to Flege, the federal states and municipalities initially waited this year for a new legal basis for the cost-benefit calculation for the rehabilitation of old railway lines, which came into force in July.
Flege rated these as progress compared to older regulations and assumes that some routes will still be reactivated when the timetable changes in December this year.
This included approximately one-kilometer sections each in Beelitz in Brandenburg and in Einbeck in Lower Saxony.
"But we only expect a single-digit number of kilometers of reactivated routes in December," he said.
In an updated brochure, the Association of German Transport Companies (VDV) proposes a total of almost 280 so-called decommissioned routes nationwide with a total length of almost 4600 kilometers that could be considered for reactivation.
From the point of view of the association, hundreds of thousands of people could be reconnected to the rail network in this way and the range of services on the rails could be significantly improved.