Some glass half-full half-empty (depending on what side of the bed you got out of) trains and planes news out of Germany:

“German Rail (DB) and German airline Lufthansa have announced plans to connect a further five cities to the Lufthansa Express Rail network in the second half of this year using extra-fast Sprinter trains.
“The service will expand to Frankfurt Airport from Hamburg and Munich from July, with additional connections to the airport from Berlin, Bremen and Münster from December. This will coincide with the launch of new sprinter services that will reduce the Munich – Cologne journey time to under four hours. Two daily return services without intermediate stops will be introduced from Munich and Nuremberg to Frankfurt Airport, further reducing the journey time by half an hour.
“DB and Lufthansa already offer 134 daily services from 17 cities to Frankfurt Airport, following a previous expansion of the scheme in July 2020 to include services to and from Hannover, Leipzig and Basle.”

Here’s a map of the train network feeding into Frankfurt’s airport:

You can probably guess what the glass half-full feeling is: More Trains!

You can probably guess what the glass half-empty feeling is: To Help People Catch Planes!

This is obviously a pre-emptive strike against a near future in which domestic flights in Germany will be banned if there is a train that can do the same route as the flight takes in under a few hours. It’s already started in France.

If the following issue isn’t properly dealt with however, it’s a very “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” move: What will Lufthansa do with the airport slots it frees up from reducing domestic flights? If it uses them to increase international flight capacity down the line, emissions will actually increase overall!

I’m not entirely sure what benefit Lufthansa gets out of this otherwise.

[Photos c/o DB]