A railway embankment five meters wider, noise protection walls up to six meters high - Frankfurt-Niederrad will change significantly in the next few years.

Deutsche Bahn wants to invest 500 million euros in order to make access to Frankfurt Central Station easier with two additional tracks for long-distance and regional traffic, thereby creating more capacity and ensuring more punctuality.

In order to be able to put up a noise protection wall, the old station building also had to give way.

And not only will another, third bridge be built across the Main, but a second one, which is a listed building, will also be demolished and replaced by a new one.

Manfred Koehler

Head of department of the Rhein-Main editorial team of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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Planners from Deutsche Bahn presented the project on Thursday, which is to be implemented step by step by 2030.

The tracks running through Niederrad were already a bottleneck, it was said, but they would not be enough once the high-speed line from Mannheim to Frankfurt was completed and more trains were to be put on the rails with the introduction of the Deutschlandtakt.

Working under a rolling wheel

Currently, two tracks for the S-Bahn and two more for long-distance and regional traffic run through Niederrad.

Nothing will change with the two tracks for the S-Bahn, they will simply be relocated.

For long-distance traffic, on the other hand, there should be four tracks, as Gerd-Dietrich Bolte, chief planner of the Deutsche Bahn subsidiary DB Netz for Hesse, explained.

The investments in Niederrad are part of the larger project to modernize the Frankfurt Stadion railway junction and represent the second construction phase. The third and final step is to lay two additional tracks to Zeppelinheim.

There, one day, the new line towards Mannheim will diverge from the existing line.

It is not possible to accommodate two more tracks on the existing, approximately 40 meter wide embankment in Niederrad, as it was said on Thursday.

That is why it will be widened by five meters on the west side, i.e. towards the office district, the Lyon district.

This also requires the construction and expansion of several railway overpasses.

When this work is completed, 3.5 kilometers of track and also several switches will have to be relaid, and finally the overhead line will have to be adjusted.

In addition, retaining walls and noise protection walls are being built on both sides, some of which will replace previous walls, but some will also protect the neighborhood from railway noise for the first time.

The project also includes another bridge on the railway site west of the Carl-von-Weinberg-Park,

with which a track leading in the direction of the Forsthaus will in future be uninterrupted from the route leading in the direction of the stadium.

A particular difficulty is that the work, as the railway workers say, has to be done while the wheels are still rolling – i.e. during ongoing operations, which requires various temporary solutions.

Temporary noise protection walls are also to be erected during the construction work.

The crossing of the Main is an important project of its own kind. Up until now, there have been two bridges in Niederrad, each with two tracks, over the river.

In the future, on the east side, i.e. the one facing the main train station, a third track will also be built for two tracks.

As it was said on Thursday, the middle one, a so-called box bridge, should also be renewed in this context.

Project manager Marko Asseng was confident on Thursday that a solution could be found with the monument protection;

The building from 1884 was placed under protection a year ago without the involvement of the state-owned company.

According to the DB Netz plan, the construction work should be completed in 2029.

The restoration of the surrounding terrain, which is required for the construction site facilities, is scheduled to end a year later.

The last phase of construction to Zeppelinheim is scheduled to begin in 2025 and last until 2032. The planning approval process is currently being prepared, as Bolte explained.

Deutsche Bahn

wants to provide online information about the project next Tuesday, March 29, from 6 p.m. The access link can be found at www.knob-online.de.