Travelling by train between Berlin and Munich will soon take two hours less.
Now that a newly electrified stretch of railway track just opened across Germany’s Thuringian Forest, travelling between Berlin and Munich will become much easier and faster.
Thelocal.de reported that trains on the new high-speed route could ultimately be driverless.
The electric lines above the tracks finally went live in late August. Now that construction is finished, testing is set to begin. The electrified track needs further testing with slower trains, whose speeds will steadily be increased until they are permitted to hit the full 300 km per hour in December 2017, citylab.com reported.
It took about 26 years to complete the new Berlin-Munich high-speed route and by the time it will be operational in the next few months, the project will have costed €10 billion – more than double the original budget, the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) reported.
The route was first planned in 1991 as part of the “Travel Project for German Unity” but it was slowed down by a mixture of political jockeying and funding hurdles, citylab.com reported.
By December 2017, people travelling between the two cities will take a whole two hours less.