End of the Line

The Financial Times Germany reported on Tuesday that Germany's Social Democratic Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee has drawn up a position paper calling for drastic cuts in government subsidies stations receive.

The report says the plan involves discontinuing all subsidies for maintenance and improvements to stations where fewer than 100 people get on or off trains per day.

The station closure plan comes as Tiefensee readies legislation, to be put forth in 2008, that would privatize parts of Germany's national rail system.

Off the Beaten Track


Local politicians, already wary of what privatization could mean for their constituencies, are up in arms about proposed cuts.

"According to Tiefensee's criteria, we'd have to shut 53 percent of stations in our region," the transportation minister of Saxony-Anhalt, Karl-Heinz Daehre, told the Financial Times. "His plans are beyond discussion for Germany's federal states."

Advocacy groups also lambasted the plans, particularly reported that subsidies would be discontinued for stations with "complicated platforms," that is, containing ramps and other modifications for disabled passengers, if they did not meet a workday minimum of 1,000 passengers.

"Ending subsidies would further reduce the already insufficient number of handicapped-friendly stations," the managing director of the German Welfare Association (Deutscher Wohlfahrtsverband), Ulrich Schneider, told the DPA news agency. Referring to Germany's ageing population, he added: "Tiefensee is showing that he's out of touch with demographic developments."

However, the transport minister's office has denied that part of the report, calling it "unfounded."

Even at the federal level Teifensee's plans have provoked ire.

"It's not very clever to connect this decision with the privatization of the German railways," the deputy head of the conservative parliamentary group, Hans-Peter Freidrich, told the AP news agency.