Dispute over the Hamburg-Hannover railway line: So now a new building

It is rare these days that a decision is made to build a completely new railway line in Germany despite massive resistance. The alliance that is now celebrating is just as unusual: from business associations to local CDU politicians to climate and transport transition activists, the agreement between transport politicians from the Union and SPD in the Bundestag to build an additional railway line between Hamburg and Hanover is being celebrated.

The existing railway line between Hamburg and Hanover makes a relatively wide berth via Lüneburg, Uelzen and Celle and is considered completely overloaded in parts. The aim is to remedy this with an additional route that will run without major detours and in large parts along the A7 motorway before it is connected to the existing route towards Hanover near Celle.

This would achieve several goals, as the coalition's transport politicians list in their recommendation for the Bundestag plenary session next week: The “existing traffic bottlenecks on the existing route” would be resolved; Long-distance travel time between the two cities would be reduced by 18 minutes to less than an hour; the new building would connect the region around the cities of Soltau and Bergen “for the first time directly and quickly by rail to the metropolises of Hamburg and Hanover”; In addition, the route would strengthen the so-called “seaport hinterland traffic” to and from the port of Hamburg.

“The coalition seems to have recognized that only this new line can finally provide the necessary relief for commuters and rail freight transport on the overloaded Hamburg-Hannover route,” says Kay Rabe von Kühlewein from the Verkehrsclub Deutschland (VCD) Lower Saxony. There is also great joy in Hamburg and Hanover and along the congested route.

But there has also been massive resistance to the new building for decades: meter-high red and yellow wooden crosses can be found throughout the region from the Harburg district in the north down through the Lüneburg Heath to the Celle district, which stand in the fields as a symbol of protest. Local citizens' initiatives complain that places and landscapes are being cut up. The Nature Conservation Association (Nabu) is also strictly against the new building. “An efficient railway and nature conservation must not be played off against each other,” says state chairman Holger Buschmann.

In addition, the opponents feel cheated. In a lengthy process in 2015, a compromise was reached between the various interest groups under the slogan “Alpha E variant”, which essentially envisaged an expansion of the existing route. This is also why, unlike the coalition partners from the Greens, the Lower Saxony SPD under its Prime Minister Olaf Lies recently made massive attempts to block the decision that has now been made.

However, the transport politicians from the Union and the SPD respond in their decision that this agreement is outdated. “According to the current state of planning and knowledge, a concept based solely on the expansion of existing routes is not sufficient, in particular, to achieve the necessary increases in capacity.” Nevertheless, such “coordination problems and misunderstandings” should be avoided in the future. So that the situation on the existing overloaded route does not only improve with the completion of the new route, the general renovation planned for 2029 by Deutsche Bahn should receive a “supplementary package of measures”.

The costs for the new building project are estimated at around 8.8 billion euros. The necessary funds for further planning should already be included in the 2027 federal budget. However, it will probably take at least until the 2040s for the route to be completed.