The German and part of the Danish railway line
Ferry at Puttgarden. Trains and cars are loaded by the lower ramp, cars only by the upper ramp.

The Vogelfluglinie (German) or Fugleflugtslinjen (Danish) is a transport corridor between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Hamburg, Germany.

As the Danish and German names (literally: bird flight line) imply, the corridor is also an important bird migration route between arctic Scandinavia and Central Europe.[1]

History

Proposals for a more direct "bird flight line" date back from the 1920s. Construction was started on the Danish side in 1941 after the Nazi occupation force pushed the matter, but work was halted again in 1946. After World War II, Warnemünde (near Rostock) was included in the territory of East Germany. Political divisions made traffic between Denmark and West Germany via Warnemünde inconvenient.

From 1951 to 1963 a ferry line from Gedser to Großenbrode operated as a temporary solution. In addition, traffic between Copenhagen and Hamburg would either be directed over the Great Belt ferry, Funen and Jutland or the Gedser-Warnemünde ferry. Construction of the "bird flight line" was restarted in 1949 and completed in 1963.

On 14 December 2019 at 20:02 the last train from DSB and Deutsche Bahn arrived in Rødbyhavn. Trains between Hamburg and Copenhagen will run via Funen and Jutland until the Fehmarnbelt connection is completed.[2] The rail ferry was discontinued because service would have been degraded massively while works on Sydbanen are ongoing.

The core of the connection is the 19-kilometre (12 mi) ferry link between Rødby (Denmark) and Puttgarden (Germany). The line is operated by Scandlines. Ferries take 45 minutes and operate twice an hour, 24 hours a day.

The projected Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link, an undersea tunnel, will replace the ferries. Danish-German negotiations on 29 June 2007 culminated in an agreement to complete the link by 2028, essentially on the basis of Danish funding.

Landside connections

Road

The road connection consists of:

  • European route E47 on the Danish side.
  • Autobahn A1 (European routes E 47 and E22) on the German side, and the two-lane Bundesstraße 207/E 47 on the northernmost section. An additional 10 km (6.2 mi) of motorway was completed by 2008, still leaving the last 25 km (16 mi) a two-lane road.

Railway

The rail connection consists of:

Until 2019, three to five EuroCity trains a day in each direction used train ferries to provide passenger services between Copenhagen and Hamburg, operated with DBAG Class 605 trains by Deutsche Bahn (out of service since 2017) and Danish IC3 trains. With the completion of the Great Belt Bridge freight trains are no longer directed via Rødby-Puttgarden, but via Funen and Jutland. Since the end of 2019, passenger trains have also used this route, which is 160 km (99 mi) longer but around 20 minutes faster and allows longer trains.[3] Only some of the IC3 trains were capable of going to Germany.[4]

These current bridges and tunnels are part of the connection:

High-speed railway under construction

'Railway axis Fehmarn Belt' as part of Denmark's high-speed rail network

The 'Railway axis Fehmarn Belt' is the Priority Project 20 of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) that seeks to establish a high-speed rail line Copenhagen–Hamburg, and which central section is the Fehmarn Belt Tunnel's railway.[5] In the north, it connects to the Øresund Bridge/Drogden Tunnel (Priority Project 11) and the Nordic Triangle railway/road axis (Priority Project 12), and in the south to Bremen and Hanover.[5] The full line currently under construction consists of several new railways to be built and old railways to be upgraded, to achieve at least a maximum speed of 200 km/h on all sections:[6]

Beeline in pictures

See also

References

  1. ↑ Norddeutscher Rundfunk. Fehmarnsundbrücke: Das Herzstück der Vogelfluglinie. Retrieved 27 October 2023.
  2. ↑ End of an Era: Last Train on Puttgarden – Rødby, Ferry Shipping News 20 December 2019. Accessed on 26 June 2022.
  3. ↑ "The train link between Germany & Scandinavia..." The Man in Seat 61. Retrieved 13 January 2020.
  4. ↑ "Med en af Europas sidste jernbanefærger" (in Danish). 28 November 2019.
  5. 1 2 "Priority Project 20: Railway axis Fehmarn Belt". 30 Priority Projects TEN-T. European Commission. Retrieved 29 June 2020.
  6. 1 2 David Burroughs (7 February 2020). "Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link rail consultancy contract awarded". International Railway Journal. Retrieved 26 June 2020.
  7. ↑ "Faser i arbejdet" (in Danish). Banedanmark. 22 May 2017. Retrieved 26 June 2020.
  8. ↑ Denis Bowers (15 June 2018). "Danish parliament approves DKr 11bn rolling stock purchase". International Railway Journal. Retrieved 26 June 2020.
  9. ↑ Gernot Knödler (18 June 2020). "Klatsche für Fehmarnbelt-Querung". Die Tageszeitung (in German). Retrieved 26 June 2020.
  10. ↑ "Entscheidung zur neuen Fehmarnsundquerung". Anbindung-fbq.de (in German). DB Netze. 3 March 2020. Retrieved 29 June 2020.

54°34′N 11°17′E / 54.567°N 11.283°E / 54.567; 11.283

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