Saturday 19th June 2021
Arming against global warming
Only half as many drive Deutsche Bahn
Deutsche Bahn is recording ever greater losses due to the corona pandemic. According to a report, only half as many people traveled by train in the first few months of the year as in the previous year. Nevertheless, the railway wants to invest millions. The ICE4 should also work at 45 degrees Celsius.
According to a media report, the corona crisis is becoming increasingly noticeable in the passenger numbers of Deutsche Bahn. In the first few months of this year, according to a report by the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, the number of long-distance passengers fell by around 50 percent compared to the previous year. The company counted only 15.6 million passengers “as of April”, the newspaper reported, citing railway documents.
In regional traffic, the number of passengers also fell by a good 40 percent to 278 million travelers. Only the transport volume for the rail freight operator rose slightly by five percent. The goals in passenger traffic for the year as a whole are in danger due to the “ongoing corona restrictions,” according to the papers.
According to the report, the punctuality values of the railway were also weak. At 80.8 percent, only a good four out of five trains were on time in May – five percent less than in the same month last year. At the freight railway, only 73 percent of the trains reached their destination on time in May – 13 percent less than in the previous year.
Preparations for global warming
At the same time, according to the new “resilience strategy”, the company wants to arm itself better against the consequences of climate change with amounts in the millions. “Climate change has long been a reality,” said Infrastructure Director Ronald Pofalla on Friday. The primary goal is therefore to achieve climate neutrality, which the group is striving for by 2040. At the same time, according to Pofalla, rail traffic is to be made “more weatherproof”.
The strategy provides, for example, that the railways will be able to react in a more targeted manner to local weather phenomena and that there will be “more climate-proof interlocking technology and energy systems”. In the future, sensors will record system temperatures and ambient conditions around the clock, so that railways can detect possible disruptions caused by climate damage early on and initiate repairs in good time.
ICE4 should also work at 45 degrees Celsius
For this purpose, all newly acquired long-distance trains should be designed for a stable indoor climate and the ICE 4 should even be prepared for outside temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius, explains the company. In the past, high outside temperatures had repeatedly caused major problems for the air conditioning systems in long-distance trains.
In order to ensure the stability of the air conditioning systems in long-distance trains, Deutsche Bahn spends an amount in the mid double-digit million range every year, according to the company. Older series would be “overhauled and re-equipped with climate-proof systems” for longer use. The same applies to vehicles in regional traffic as well as to new DB S-Bahn trains.
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