For Katrin Engeln it is a horror idea. The two railway tracks across Bad Schwartau are to be framed on both sides with soundproof walls up to eight meters high over a distance of around two kilometers. "Our city is being brutally cut up. This is a plan that has nothing to do with common sense," complains the mayor of the town right next to Lübeck. At the end of July, citizens of the city expressed their objection in the form of hundreds of objections.
It's about a short section of the hinterland connection to the motorway and railway tunnel from the island of Fehmarn across to Denmark. It is to be expanded into two tracks for a speed of 200 km/h over around a hundred kilometers.
The Fehmarnbelt Tunnel is currently northern Germany's largest transport project. When it is finished, it will enable a direct transport connection between Hamburg and Copenhagen under the Baltic Sea. It is considered an important European infrastructure project and the tunnel is scheduled to be completed in 2031. But the construction of the connection to the tunnel is already threatening to become an embarrassment on the German side.
Fight against the project “with all legal means”
This starts with protests from local residents. According to Engeln, Bad Schwartau, for example, wants to prevent construction across the city “by all legal means”. The municipality sees an alternative: just as the A1 motorway circles around the town in a large arc, the ICE and freight train routes to Denmark could also run there. The railway is not commenting on the proposal. A company spokesman says they “do not yet have any concrete information” about the objections.
But the many citizen objections are already delaying the plan approval. It is a prerequisite for building law and therefore for the actual start of construction. It is unclear how long the process will take - and that in only one of a total of ten project sections on the route to the Baltic Sea.
Bahn shocked with a new construction price of 10.7 billion euros
Experts see a central problem for Deutsche Bahn in large infrastructure projects. “The company lacks qualified engineers with railway know-how everywhere – also due to a lack of training capacity – both in the planning and execution of construction projects,” criticize Bastian Ehrenholz and Fabian Zwick from the Technical University of Braunschweig: “Then errors quickly creep in that cost time and money.”
Ehrenholz and Zwick prepared a capacity report for rail traffic in the greater Lübeck area on behalf of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck. Their result: The current double-track railway line will become a bottleneck if more traffic rolls towards the Fehmarnbelt in the future and at the same time the planned German rhythm in local transport brings additional trains onto the rails.
But the railway did not include the proposal to expand the route in its planning. This means that the Lübeck rail junction could become a bottleneck on the trans-European rail route from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Delays “due to a train in front” would then be the result more frequently.
Even without additional tracks in Bad Schwartau and Lübeck, the overall project is becoming increasingly expensive. The railway recently shocked everyone with a new construction price of 10.7 billion euros, 30 percent more than last November.
“The final costs can only be determined once the planning, including possible changes to the plan, has been approved,” says the railway spokesman, indicating further additional costs. The first step is to set a binding commissioning date. “Our costs are based on this.” Then followed tenders and discussions with industry or internal service providers so that “corresponding risk buffers can be calculated seriously”.
Not only the railway itself, but also politicians and authorities repeatedly slow down large infrastructure projects. The financing sometimes changes within a year, observes engineer Bastian Ehrenholz. As a result, trained project teams would have to be restructured and important project knowledge would be lost in the process. Mayor Engeln notes that the combination of local, long-distance and freight transport on the same tracks creates a confusion of competences: local transport is a state matter, while long-distance and freight transport falls under federal responsibility. “Everyone wants to have a say, but doesn’t want to bear any responsibility or costs,” says Engeln.
The Hanseatic city of Lübeck is eagerly awaiting the completion of the fast connection to Scandinavia. The city strongly criticizes the “railroad operational science study” presented by the railway on the Lübeck railway junction. To calculate the operating program, the railway removed local transport services from the Deutschlandtakt timetable, cut regional express connections such as “Kiel-Lübeck-Lüneburg” and calculated stopovers of up to ten minutes at the main station for ICE trains.
“These reductions are technically incomprehensible and lead to the actual traffic load in the junction being systematically underestimated,” says Michael Stödter, transport transition officer for the Hanseatic city. There is a “clear risk of having already created a capacity bottleneck on the day of the opening”.
As a result, the impression arises that “the Fehmarnbelt crossing project of the century does not act as a catalyst for future-oriented infrastructure development, but rather postpones necessary expansion steps into the future,” says a paper from the Hanseatic city. The railway rejects the allegations: the criticism is “not correct”. The planning is based on the “train number forecasts” for the future Germany cycle.
The “Fehmarnbelt Dialogue Forum” experienced a positive surprise at the beginning of July. At a meeting in Oldenburg in Holstein, Susanne Henckel, State Secretary in the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Economics and Transport, announced that the “Bäderbahn” from Lübeck via the seaside resorts of Timmendorfer Strand, Scharbeutz and Haffkrug to Neustadt in Holstein would continue to live and even be upgraded for electrical operation.
The railway actually wanted to close the single-track line with the construction of the new Fehmarn connection and replace it with “greenfield” stations on the new line. This sparked considerable protests. But now the Federal Railway Authority has decreed that holidaymakers and residents of the Bay of Lübeck must not depend on the rails. The consequence: Now we have to plan again, explains a spokesman for the Ministry of Transport in Kiel. According to its own information, the railway does not yet have a planning order.
There is already a “fallback option” that costs millions
On Fehmarn, in the last kilometers before the Belt Tunnel, the double-track electrified line is being built. But even before Fehmarnsund, the Baltic Sea narrows between the island and Ostholstein, everything is unclear. Actually, the highway and railway tracks should be led through the water in a tunnel, just like over the Belt.
But the planning approval is still missing for construction to begin at the beginning of 2026. According to the railway company, this is now expected in autumn. There is already a “fallback option” worth millions: the listed Fehmarnsund Bridge, the landmark of the old bird flight line, has a track that could be equipped for electrical operation.
For the construction time of the tunnel, which is estimated at five and a half years, this bottleneck would be sufficient to cope with gradually increasing rail traffic. Provided that the connection through Holstein is completed by then. The Federal Audit Office, on the other hand, questions whether the elegant bridge can technically handle this volume of traffic.
Everyone is eagerly awaiting the forecast from the Danish tunnel builder Femern A/S about the commissioning of the structure, which will be announced for autumn. “At a top meeting this summer, the Federal Ministry of Transport and our Danish partners agreed that they wanted to have more clarity on a new schedule by autumn,” the railway spokesman describes the situation somewhat vaguely.
Discussions about this were ongoing. It has long been clear that the Danes want to open the motorway connection as soon as it is finished. Because the tunnel construction must be financed through toll revenue. It will take a few years longer before the ICE can travel from Hamburg to Copenhagen in two and a half hours.
