Building the second S-Bahn Stammstrecke - Munich

The construction of the 2nd S-Bahn main route (Stammstrecke) approaches.

The final planning of the 2nd part of the building work on the S-Bahn Stammstrecke is finished. The plans have been split up into 3 parts for clarity's sake : the first beginning at Laim train station including the new S-Bahn stop at Hauptbahnhof (tief / deep) and ending at the Justizpalast (palace of justice / law courts). The 2nd part connects there and goes through Marienplatz to the east part of the banks of the Isar. Part 3 starts from there and goes to Ostbahnhof and then Leuchtenbergring.

The plans for parts 2 and 3 have been forwarded to the government of Oberbayern.

The papers and plans for part 2 were on public display from 18.07 to 18.08 at the Munich Stadtmuseum. At the end of this display period, a 2-week opposition periods begins for those wishing to raise objection against the plans for part 2, until 01.09. Part 3 will be on display from 19.09 to 19.10 and part 1 from 14.11 till 14.12 (provisionally).

After the oppostions have been processed, dates for a debate will be set. The objections will be discussed during this debate and DB ProjektBau will make an official comment. The discussion for parts 1 and 3 will take place in 2006.

(Summarised from the S-Bahn Takt Magazine, issue Sept/Oct 2005).

So it doesn't look the 2nd tunnel is going to be finished before something like 2015.

Just checked with some sites, and the S-Bahn "Ringschluss" project to link Erding
to the Airport/Freising will be in planning until 2009/2010

I just love how fast germans build things...

Build slowly but display quickly: What, just for one minute? Hitch-Hiker's Guide comes to mind...

That would be 1 month long

Tbh when I read the article above, I didn't really understand what they're building, so I hope my post wasn't confusing. I'm sure more will be printed soon.

They are amazing, aren't they?

Not that England is any better - Wembley Stadium anyone?

Not to mention the millenium bridge which was built on time but after opening (2000) was found to be structurally unsound and had to be closed until January 2002.

Or the Diana memorial fountain in Hyde park which opened in July 2004 which stopeed working in the first week due to a blocked pump and in it's second week due to fallen leaves. And I paticularly like Mohammed Al Fayeds description of it.

Mohamed al Fayed, whose son Dodi died with Diana in her Paris car crash in 1997, said the memorial resembled "a sewage works."

Of course it was also shut for nearly 6 months due to various safety concerns.

Yeah like London's "CrossRail" which the British have been discussing to and from for 20 years...

Four years later and, needless to say, little progress has been made on this beyond cost projections being rapidly increased. The debate has focussed on whether the costs of the second tunnel (currently €1.9bn) can be justified compared to the alternative of upgrading the Südring, the track currently used by regional and intercity trains travelling from Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof, at a cost of around one-quarter. The MVV will release a study in September showing that the second S-Bahn tunnel would justify the cost, but residents on the eastern bank of the Isar have already started their protests against the project because of the disruption caused by (at that point) two tunnels, while concerns have also been raised about the stability of the ground beneath the Frauenkirche, directly under which the tunnel would pass.

The engineering firm Vieregg-Rössler – long-term proponents of the Südring scheme – have since formalised the idea of a northern tunnel as a complement to the Südring project. A tunnel would run from Hauptbahnhof via the Pinakotheken to Münchner Freiheit, and from there on to Garching before potentially joining the S1 line at Eching. They claim this would solve no less than seven transport problems in one go, including a fast link to the airport (17 minutes), a fast connection to the Allianz Arena, relieving one of Germany's most congested lines – the Freising-Munich stretch – allowing a 10-minute service on the S1 as well, opening up the airport to long-distance ICE services as in Frankfurt, and relieving the U3/U6 line.

Projected costs are €2.4 billion. The general consensus is that Munich will only be financially able to undertake one major infrastructural improvement in the next thirty years; if it's the second Stammstrecke tunnel, then that still leaves open a lot of other problems. The relatively small scale of the Südring project, however, would allow another major project to be built, i.e. the North Tunnel.

Maps and plans of the Nordtunnel are available in the press release (PDF)

OK...not likely to see it in the near future anyway.

this Nordtunel plan sounds fairly sensible. It'll never get built.

So is this crowd mostly just NIMBYs or do they actually have a point? I can see some borderline scare tactics, which is uncool ("wollen Sie wissen, ob unter Ihrem Haus gegraben wird?"), but does anyone think they actually have a legitimate complaint? At street level, trams are of course way louder than the S-Bahn as they go through the Stammstrecke.

A bunch of (probably car-driving) Nimbys. They are campaigning against a below-ground solution in favour of an above-ground solution that will cause a lot more noise for a lot more people – but not for them.

I can understand the opposition to the tunnel, but this is for completely the wrong reason. They have only their own interests at heart, not those of the city as a whole. I have to put up with this every day in Freising with the Nimby campaign against the third runway. My favourite is a sign that someone put outside their house on a busy main road that reads "We've had enough of the noise and dirt" – but they're talking about the airport (which we neither see, smell nor hear in Freising), not the big road outside their house.

Wouldn't that be: Numbys?

@STB: that's kind of what I figured, but the reasoning I had the patience to find on that awful (design-wise) website was the argument that the Südring was way cheaper.

@thefirelane