Keith Fender

THE German city of Augsburg is planning to construct a new tram line and a tram/rail interchange beneath the main station as part of its wider Project Augsburg City urban regeneration project.

WITH the prospect of competition from a new operator looming, German Rail (DB) announced on June 24 that it plans to expand the Sylt Shuttle car-carrying service on the 39.3km line between Niebüll in the northern state of Schleswig Holstein and Westerland on the island of Sylt.

SNCF CEO Mr Guillaume Pepy and the mayor of Paris Ms Anne Hidalgo presented plans on June 24 to expand capacity at Gare du Nord, Paris' busiest station which is used by up to 800,000 passengers per day.

NETHERLANDS Railways (NS) has exercised an option with Bombardier for 18 additional class 186 Traxx multi-system locomotives, which will be used to operate 160km/h passenger services from Amsterdam to Rotterdam and The Hague via the HSL South high-speed line.

THE city of Berlin and the state government of Brandenburg announced on June 3 that they will directly award two of three contracts for the operation of the Berlin S-Bahn network to German Rail (DB).
Contracts for the operation of the network were split into three following unsuccessful attempts to tender these services.

GERMANY's railfreight industry has suffered a disappointing start to 2015, according to figures released by Germany's federal statistics agency Destatis on June 3, which show the largest decline in first quarter traffic since the height of the financial crisis.

GERMAN Rail (DB) has decided to terminate the lease on the fleet of 13 class 605 ICE-TD inter-city DMUs used by Danish State Railways (DSB) on Eurocity services from Hamburg to Copenhagen and Aarhus.

THE first of four additional Variobahn low-floor LRVs being supplied to Transport for London (TfL) by Stadler Pankow for the Croydon Tramlink network was delivered by road to Croydon over the weekend of May 3-4.

GORAIL, the only operator of regular passenger services between Estonia and Russia, has announced it will withdraw all of its remaining cross-border services next month.

THELLO, the open-access joint venture between Trenitalia and Transdev, increased the number of direct trains between Nice and Milan from one to three train pairs from April12.