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The Deutsche Bahn subsidiary DB Cargo will purchase up to 400 new freight locomotives from Siemens in the coming years. Delivery should begin in 2023, as the railway company announced to the dpa news agency. Therefore, the costs amount to “more than a billion euros”. The wagons are twin-engine locomotives that can run on electricity from overhead lines and on diesel engines.
“We will grow and rejuvenate our fleet for our customers with a modern, high-performance locomotive,” said Ralf Günter Kloß, production manager at DB Cargo.
Vehicles will be used in the so-called last mile between customer sidings and main lines. These sections of track are usually not electrified and, therefore, can only be circulated with combustion engines. Locomotives continue to run where there are overhead lines. The new models should be able to convert to electric propulsion.
DB Cargo wants to significantly reduce its fleet of diesel locomotives
Conventional diesel locomotives currently represent 50 percent of the DB Cargo fleet. The company aims to reduce this proportion from 10 to 15 percent by 2030. In addition to twin-engine locomotives, DB Cargo is also currently testing so-called hybrid locomotives, in which a diesel engine simply supports electric propulsion.
The entire Deutsche Bahn group wants to ban all diesel vehicles from its fleet by 2050. But there is still a lot to do before then. Because the size of the diesel fleet also depends on the degree of electrification of the rail network.
Electrification of the road network takes time
So far, about 61 percent of the route network has been equipped with airlines. There were still about 13,000 kilometers to go, according to a federal government response to a request from the FDP in late July. Expansion is only proceeding slowly. Last year only 60 kilometers were electrified.
However, the Federal Government Railways Commissioner Enak Ferlemann said at the time that the fee looked much better relative to the actual performance of transportation. According to this, about 90 percent of train traffic in Germany is carried out on power lines.
