The completion of renovation work on the major railway line between Berlin and Hamburg has been delayed indefinitely, operator Deutsche Bahn said on Monday.<\/p>\n
Due to severe winter weather in recent weeks, the target for completing the work by the end of April cannot be met.<\/p>\n
The core problem is the underground cabling for the signalling systems, the railway operator said.<\/p>\n
“We are experiencing the harshest winter in 15 years in Germany, especially in the north and east,” said Deutsche Bahn official Gerd-Dietrich Bolte.<\/p>\n
Work on the line has been delayed for six weeks because frost and snow have made it almost impossible to lay the cables for the signalling and interlocking systems.<\/p>\n
“This is where we are experiencing extreme difficulties and have made virtually no progress,” he said. “Since the beginning of January, we have been watching every week and the weather forecast with bated breath.”<\/p>\n
The Hamburg-Berlin railway line has been closed for renovation since the beginning of August 2025. The 280-kilometre line is one of the most important commuter routes in Germany, with around 30,000 long-distance passengers and a total of 470 trains per day.<\/p>\n
According to Deutsche Bahn, the general renovation was urgently needed because the route could hardly cope with the volume of traffic.<\/p>\n
Trains are being diverted via Stendal and Uelzen, extending the journey time by an average of 45 minutes.<\/p>\n
The complete renovation of the Hamburg-Berlin line is part of a larger initiative on the German railway network.<\/p>\n
Deutsche Bahn is aiming to modernize more than 40 busy rail corridors by 2036. The first step was taken in 2024 with the line between Frankfurt and Mannheim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The completion of renovation work on the major railway line between Berlin and Hamburg has been delayed indefinitely,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[99],"tags":[112,1834,190,8888,11468,11469],"class_list":["post-15752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-deutsche-bahn","tag-germany","tag-hamburg","tag-hamburg-berlin","tag-railway-line"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}