Cologne Administrative Court allows Deutsche Bahn to raise route prices

Deutsche Bahn will be allowed to increase route prices - a kind of toll for rail - to the planned extent next year - and even beyond that. The Cologne Administrative Court (VG Cologne) has upheld a corresponding lawsuit from the federally owned company, as the VG announced. The lawsuit was directed against a decision by the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA), which stipulated a lower upper limit for route prices than the railway had registered for 2027.

According to the administrative court's decision, the railway will be allowed to pass on around 8.2 billion euros to transport companies next year. That's even more than the around 7.55 billion euros that the railway originally registered with the BNetzA as an upper limit. The authority ultimately only approved a limit of around 7.3 billion euros.

Circles: Bahn will probably not make full use of the new framework

Railway circles said that the higher upper limits set by the court will probably not be exhausted.

The railway subsidiary DB InfraGo is the operator of the German rail network. Anyone who wants to ride on it has to pay a fee to them. InfraGo uses this to finance, among other things, operation, maintenance and investments in the rail network.

The fee is charged per kilometer and varies for the three types of transport: freight, long-distance and regional transport. The respective route prices must be re-approved by the Federal Network Agency every year using a complex procedure.

How much the fees per kilometer will rise on average in the coming year has not yet been conclusively clarified. The urgent procedure before the administrative court in Cologne has delayed the determination. InfraGo had originally announced an increase of 12.6 percent in freight transport, 7.7 percent in regional transport and 5.3 percent in long-distance transport.

Possible impact on regional transport services

In freight transport, the competitor association Die Güterbahnen recently assumed that companies there would have to pay 3.92 euros per kilometer in the future instead of the previous 3.48 euros. That would therefore be an additional burden of around 112 million euros.

Fees would also rise significantly in regional transport. This could also have an impact on the offer for passengers, as companies there are already struggling with sharply increased costs for personnel and energy, for example. In March, the European Court of Justice overturned the so-called train path price brake, which exempted local rail passenger transport companies from sharply rising train path prices.

According to its own information, the decision of the VG Cologne is unappealable.