Long-distance and freight transport against the network division: sister companies of the railway are at odds

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ICE in Munich Central Station

Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa

A dispute has broken out in the railway company over the high fees for the infrastructure.

In confidential statements available to SPIEGEL, the group's subsidiaries DB Fernverkehr and DB Cargo complain about a "redistribution at the expense of their own economic segments ... without any objective justification for the differentiated cost increase."

The letters amount to a declaration of war on the company's infrastructure division.

After minor reforms by the traffic light coalition, it has been oriented towards the common good since the beginning of 2024 and is called DB InfraGo.

This is now struggling with the overload and insecure financing of the network, which the company had neglected for decades.

Because the money for the renovation cannot come from the federal budget alone, the fees for rail use, the so-called route prices, are to be increased from 2025.

According to criticism, long-distance and freight transport will be burdened significantly more than regional transport, whose route prices are capped due to regionalization funds.

According to the document, prices could increase by 14.3 to 19.5 percent.

Such an increase would contradict the political goal of “shifting transport to climate-friendly rail”.

Criticism of the Germany ticket

DB Fernverkehr warns that the planned investment program in vehicles and workshops can no longer be implemented with such a price increase because it was planned on the basis of other route prices.

Parts of the offer would become uneconomical and would have to be discontinued.

Because this would in turn lead to lower income for the infrastructure company, there is a risk of a downward spiral with further price adjustments and supply restrictions.

In addition, the Deutschlandticket puts a strain on long-distance transport, as it involves “certain shifting effects” from the discounted local transport.

Since the introduction of the offer, also known as the 49-euro ticket, passengers have increasingly used cheap local transport.

DB Long-Distance Transport argues that it cannot pass on the route price increases to its customers "even given the state of the network (punctuality, diversions, failures)" and that they would therefore have a full impact on the result.

The freight transport division DB Cargo said in its statement that it would be forced to pass on the higher prices to customers.

However, this would “drastically reduce” the competitiveness of rail freight transport.

Many customers would “turn their backs on rail and switch to other modes of transport such as road.”

Rail competitors such as Flixtrain and the Alliance for Fair Competition in Rail Transport (Mofair) have long criticized the pricing policy of the former Netz AG.

They argue that the high track charges restrict competition because private providers are less able to cope with them than the state-run DB Long-Distance.

The fact that the company is now rebelling against the pricing policy of its sister company is a novelty.