GERMAN RAILWAY Chairman Hartmut Mehdorn does not want much. Speaking at DB’s 1999 annual results press conference on May 10 in Berlin, Mehdorn called for both federal government and the Länder to provide further funding for infrastructure modernisation to deal with a ’huge backlog’ from previous years. The backlog was apparently larger than envisaged in the programme of reforms implemented during the 1990s - ’today the railway is running on a network whose architecture dates from the 1930s and which has not been thoroughly modernised in the last 50 years’.
Given that in the last 15 years huge chunks of the DB network have been upgraded, that new lines have been built from Mannheim to Stuttgart, and from Hannover to Würzburg and to Berlin, that an entire S-Bahn network has been created in Hannover, that S-Bahn extensions have been built in München, Nürnberg and elsewhere, that new high speed lines are being built from Nürnberg to Ingolstadt and K
