RailFreight.com — 2022-08-16
Land transportation
The completion of the Rastatt tunnel on the Rhine Alpine corridor is pushed back again. The railway tunnel in Germany will not be operational until mid-2026, Deutsche Bahn has said. The tunnel was planned to be delivered in 2025, according to the reconstruction plan made after its collapse in 2017.
Without the collapse of the Rastatt tunnel, which caused significant damage to the railway network, the structure would have been operational this year. A much-needed piece of infrastructure, it would have directed freight trains on the busy line under the German city, to make this section of the Rhine-Alpine corridor more efficient.
Current status
The west tube of the Rastatt Tunnel is now complete. Only smaller connecting tunnels, so-called cross passages, are currently being built there. The big problem, however, is the east tube, in which the damaged gigantic tunnel boring machine is still standing, reports the German media site SWR.
Before the tube is built here, the drilling machine must be taken out. To do this, a 17-metre deep and 200-metre long excavation pit must first be made. That should happen in the middle of next year. Only then can the tunnel be completed, the German railway company accordingly explained to NEE, the network of European Railways.
New timescale not realised
A new timescale and remediation strategy for the opening of the new railway line between Karlsruhe in Germany and Basel in Switzerland, of which the Rastatt tunnel forms part, was published three years ago, in August 2019.
“With the current plan, the tunnel would not open until 2025, three years later than originally planned when construction started in 2013”, the DB chief executive at that time Dirk Rompf said upon the announcement.
The collapse
The first intervention of this plan was the collapse of the tunnel. The accident led to nearly two months of limited capacity on Europe’s main north-south artery. The Kalrsruhe-Basel line was closed for traffic, and capacity of the bypasses was limited.
Apart from the damage to the track, railway companies suffered financial losses. Five years after the tunnel accident, these losses in the rail freight sector have totaled around €100m, according to the NEE. Several companies have laid claims to have these losses compensated, but without an answer so far. The so-called evidence gathering process is still ongoing – the causes of the accident are not officially known.