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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

German here. The idea in general is extremely awesome... but the problem is, us Germans (or rather, our previous Conservative government) took pride in investing in highways instead of railways - and so, when the beautiful tunnel is built, it will take many years until it can be actually used at capacity because we couldn't be arsed to build out the railway route 5702 from Kufstein to Rosenheim and 5510 from Rosenheim to Munich [1] to four rails instead of the current two, which are split between regional S-Bahn trains, inter-regional trains, freight trains and high-speed trains.

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/brennerbasistunnel-deut...

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Very similar to the situation with the Gotthard Base Tunnel. Switzerland managed to build the longest railway tunnel in the world within 17 years, and we will barely manage to build a few kilometers of supporting infrastructure in the Rhine valley, which is mostly flat and rural, until 2035 [1]. It's embarrassing, really.

[1] https://bauprojekte.deutschebahn.com/p/karlsruhe-basel

As far as I remember this is also against promises made, showing Germany to be an unreliable partner in such undertakings.

Trusting German rail companies to do anything sane or agreed upon is a fool's errand. Their leadership and structures are so brittle, things just don't get done.

I say companies, because DB is split into 500 sub-companies that have their own infrastructure and seemingly don't work together very effectively.

The problem in that specific case is not the Bahn organization itself, but politics. On one hand you have a lot of regional NIMBYs, and on the other hand we have had 16 years of Conservative government which was wholly bought off by the car lobby which meant that there was no interest in solving the issues (even if, need be, by drowning the NIMBYs in money). Only thing that got done railway-wise is the start of Stuttgart 21 (which is mostly a prestige project, not something that actually makes sense) and the start of the 2nd Munich S-Bahn tunnel.

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