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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Germany desperately needs to electrify more. The trip from Zürich to Munich took an extra 30 minutes because locomotives had to be switched for the non-electrified part of the track in Germany.[1]

Also they finally need finish the access to the Alpentransversalen[2] which because of NIMBY and other things is extremely delayed.

[1] https://company.sbb.ch/de/medien/medienstelle/medienmitteilu...

[2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/europaeischer-bahn-gueterkorrid...

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Fun fact: The Zurich-Munich electrification was paid by an interest-free loan by the Swiss confederacy, in order to finally saturate the North-South line from Germany to Italy that was heavily expanded in Switzerland.

The trains are still always delayed by 30 min because it’s single track on long stretches and delays always happen in the German and Austrian part of this line.

And the Basel-Karlsruhe line is still not finished.

Genuinly curious - can locomotive run on batteries (which it drags behind it, in a form of a train car) for the tracks which are not electrified? Or is the cost (or sth. else) prohibitive?

Yes, they are doing exactly that, having a normal electric train which has batteries under the cars (no extra waggon) for 40-200km of not electrified track. It’s for regional trains though with lower energy needs (and because non electrified long distance tracks really make no sense).

Linking German Wikipedia because it has long history of them and current projects,

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkumulatortriebwagen

Thank you!

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