The railway company is indirectly affected by the strike.
(Photo: IMAGO/Stefan Zeitz)
Dusseldorf The strike in long-distance rail transport announced for next Monday brings the private regional railways against the DB Group. In a conference call, the state-owned company informed the approximately 400 affected traffic managers on Friday that they would only be informed on Sunday evening at 9 p.m. about the signal boxes that were failing due to the strike. The participants of the conversation reported this to the Handelsblatt.
“There was a storm of indignation afterwards,” said one of them. At this point in time, it was no longer possible to reschedule driving operations for Monday.
As a result of the railway’s cautious information policy, private regional railway providers are now also victims of the work stoppage, whose workforce is not dominated by the EVG railway workers’ union, which is ready to go on strike. The railway company ODEG was one of the first to announce on Friday that, contrary to what was planned, it would not serve any of its train lines in north-eastern Germany.
According to the private railway company, the company’s own transport company will not be directly on strike, but the expected warning strike by DB dispatchers will affect operations. The fact that there was no information from DB Netz AG about the navigability of individual routes on Monday proved to be particularly problematic.
Some subsidiaries of the DB Regio competitor Transdev such as the Nordwestbahn, but also the Osthannoversche Eisenbahnen, Erixx, Vlexx and the Eurobahn announced that they would stop their traffic on Monday.
question of compensation
The fact that the infrastructure subsidiary of the railways will not give an estimate by Sunday evening as to which of their signal boxes will fail due to a high level of ECG organization reduces the risk of recourse claims from private regional railways at DB, according to DB competitors. Because if the private companies ceased operations of their own accord, it would be difficult for them to demand compensation from the railways. It is not yet clear whether there is any right to compensation at all.
When asked about the criticized information policy, a DB spokeswoman said that DB was not allowed to ask about the number of union members in the signal boxes or in other areas of the group. “So we don’t know where there will be restrictions on the network,” she says.
With a large-scale nationwide warning strike, the railway and transport union (EVG) and Verdi want to paralyze large parts of public transport next Monday. Affected are long-distance rail traffic, local traffic in many federal states and municipalities, almost all German airports, waterways and ports as well as motorways. DB regional traffic will also be almost completely stopped on Monday, a spokeswoman said.
More: Deutsche Bahn announces complete failure of long-distance traffic