Deutsche Bahn has announced that construction of the Stuttgart 21 (S21) train station will not be finished until December 2026. The project has been in the works since the 1990s.

New Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof U-Bahn station delayed

Germany’s national rail company Deutsche Bahn has announced that construction of the Stuttgart 21 project at the city’s main station, which began in 2010, will be delayed again until December 2026.

The Stuttgart 21 project involves building a new U-Bahn station under the city’s central station (Hauptbahnhof) and modernising the ground-level, central station, with an initial opening date set for December 2025.

Following a meeting between project partners in Stuttgart this week, Transport Minister for Baden-Württemberg Winfried Hermann said that digitalising the track network for Stuttgart, which is a central node, has proven more complex than initially expected and "geologically challenging subsoil in the Stuttgart city area" has delayed construction significantly. In the meantime, the ground-level train station will remain in operation, “that is our buffer”, said Hermann. 

Critics say S21 funding means nationwide renovations are sidelined

In the works since the 1990s, costs of the Stuttgart 21 project have grown from an initial 3 billion euros in 2009 to 9,15 billion in 2022, with the new opening date expected to add another 100 million to the bill.

A ruling in May 2024 by the Stuttgart Administrative Court decided that Deutsche Bahn alone must bear these costs, leading politicians and campaign groups to question whether shutting down other rail construction projects may come as a consequence.

In a recent press release, the Bürgerbahn Denkfabrik Initiative said that it fears the extra costs could lead Deutsche Bahn to delay rail renovation projects which are so badly needed to cut down the historic delay times recorded at Deutsche Bahn each year. 

The organisation has appealed to federal and state politicians to “finally begin learning how the network can become a climate-friendly rail as quickly as possible without overpriced and wrongly launched major projects”. 

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