Every day, up to 370 trains. One of the most important railway lines in Europe, which remains on the Rhine valley railway, up to 7. Of October blocked. Until then, an emergency concept is activated, the Deutsche Bahn has to grab.
The construction site of the Rhine valley railway in Rastatt
Actually, the damage to the rail should be fixed track in Rastatt in southwest Germany, after a few days, and the Rhine valley railway be temporarily passable. Now the path announced from the 7. October to roll again the trains on the track. On the penultimate weekend, the tracks were gone and had given way to a Tunnel construction site in Rastatt the earth. And so a train was blocking the route connecting the ports of Rotterdam and Duisburg, with Genoa and to the North and West of Europe with those of Italy.
The route on the Rhine is also a bottleneck for the European passenger transport. Day-to-day up to a total of 370 trains with goods and passengers normally pass through the point at which suddenly the tracks had bent down. Because the construction site was monitored under the track, prevented a greater misfortune. But for now, nothing more, and the trains have to take large detours.
Detours via France
For some goods the transport of these detours also lead to changes in a wide arc across France. With the corresponding additional costs. The network of European Railways has estimated the loss of revenue for the freight trains to 12 million euros per week. In freight transport, the railway is in hard competition with the trucks on the roads, and also with barges on the great rivers.
Well a week after the start of the Blockade, complains the industry, could only travel ten per cent of the normal rail traffic on diversion routes. The are overloaded chronic. For individual companies in the sector, the situation could be rapidly life threatening, warned the managing Director of the Association of German transport companies Martin Henke. He demanded that the policy “financial support” for the affected companies.
Concrete for the final Tunnel
Deutsche Bahn stated that they are working day and night on the restoration of the blocked stretch of the road between Baden-Baden and Rastatt. There is a section of the 182-Kilometer-long Rhine valley rail should be tunneled under. At the time of the a piece of the almost finished tunnel from Rastatt broke.
Now, just a bored Tunnel will be filled in again, in order to stabilize the railway line. Concrete is injected into the 150-Meter-long tunnel tube. The 18-million-Euro so-called tunnel boring machine is set in concrete. This gigantic drill for the underground work is 90 meters long. All in all, spent 10,000 cubic metres of concrete, the ill, the lowering of the railroad tracks Lord. Ten thousand cubic meters, equivalent to the weight of 1,300 concrete mixers. Normally on the road.
ar/uhe (afp, Reuters archive)