Reducing the 505 kilometer (314 mile) journey to just over 4 hours, down from 6 hours and 15 minutes, will finally offer genuinely fast land transit across one of Central Europe’s most important routes. When the convenience of downtown-to-downtown travel is factored in, the high-speed rail link (trains will eventuall run at speeds of up to 300 kilometers per hour) will give planes and highways a run for their money.
The plan might sound like a classic example of often cited German efficiency, if it weren’t for the fact that the country has had to wait quite a while for the link. In fact, they’ve had to wait no less than 26 years. [...]
The project took so long for two reasons. Firstly, it was slowed down by a mixture of political jockeying and funding hurdles. A fight between two of Germany’s federal states—Saxony and Thuringia—over whose territory would host the new route provided several years delay, while funding dried up just before the millennium, leaving the track site growing weeds for a protracted seven-year hiatus.
here is, however, another more understandable reason. The terrain the new line needed to cross was by no means easy. The Thuringian Forest is, despite its name, actually a low mountain range, albeit one whose flanks are heavily wooded. It lies midway between Berlin and Bavaria, a broad bar of rough country that looks almost as if it was expressly designed to keep the two regions separate. Crossing this area with high-speed tracks meant constructing 29 new railway viaducts and 22 tunnels, one of which is 8 kilometers (or about 5 miles) long. Given the landscape, it’s not surprising that the new stretch of track cost €10 billion ($11.15 billion). Even now, the electrified track isn’t running at full speed—it still needs further testing with slower trains, whose speeds will steadily be increased until they are permitted to hit the full 300 km per hour in December 2017.
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