Bad news for Berlin commuters: The railway line to the capital will be closed for a long time.
It will probably be the biggest major renovation in the history of Deutsche Bahn: the heavily frequented commuter route between Hamburg and Berlin will have to be completely closed due to extensive construction work. And for a long time.
Construction work will start on Friday, August 16th, and will last until the timetable change on December 14th. During this time, long-distance trains will travel via Stendal, Uelzen and Lüneburg and will sometimes stop at these stations. The journey time will be extended by around 45 minutes. Since sections of the route can only be used on one track, only one long-distance train will run per hour instead of the previous two. This will have an impact on capacity utilization.
Commuters who want to travel from Hamburg to Wittenberge have to use replacement buses. These buses also stop in Ludwigslust. The route via Schwein will also be a construction site: no ICE trains will run on this route until September 29. There are replacement buses and one IC per day runs via Lübeck.
The costs of the construction work are impressive. The renovation will cost around 2.2 billion euros. This amount already includes a risk buffer of around 400 million euros, as the state-owned company announced.
Construction work is scheduled to begin during the summer holidays in both federal states. In Hamburg, school will start again on September 3, 2025, while in Berlin it will not start until September 8. The renovation work is expected to be completed in April 2026.
The background to the construction work is a program with which the railway wants to fundamentally renovate around 40 heavily used routes by 2030 in order to become more punctual and reliable. “DB is expanding the heavily used rail network into a high-performance network this decade,” the company itself writes about the large-scale construction project. “Modern facilities significantly reduce the number of infrastructure-related disruptions, and additional overtaking options for trains ensure greater flexibility.”
Another route that is now being modernized is the route between Frankfurt am Main and Mannheim. The company is planning a construction period of five months for the 117-kilometer-long route.
