It emerged this week that the German railway company Deutsche Bahn is sending empty trains running around Berlin. Citing "insiders," the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reports that about "five or six ICE trains are driven through and around the city at night with no passengers on board."
The reason for this is the lack of railway sidings. Berlin is located in the far northeast of Germany, and many long-distance rail lines end in the German capital. Consequently, a lot of train journeys terminate there in the evening, and depart from there in the morning. However, there are simply not enough tracks where stationary trains can be parked.
The tracks in and around the city are busy, and some passenger trains still run at night. So Deutsche Bahn's high-speed ICEs are forced to keep moving, to whichever tracks are not in use at any given time. A DB spokesperson described this to Der Tagespiegel as "a completely normal operational procedure."
The newspaper reports that Deutsche Bahn abandoned plans to lay new sidings just to the south of Berlin after protests from local residents. It now plans to construct a similar facility in the northern district of Pankow.
This aimless running of trains doesn't only waste electricity. The drivers who work........