DB General Refurbishment of the Riedbahn High-Speed Rail Corridor
The Riedbahn is the pilot project for the comprehensive refurbishment of Deutsche Bahn’s high-speed rail network – Germany’s largest infrastructure project.
For the northern section from Biblis to Frankfurt, SPITZKE SE and LEONHARD WEISS GmbH & Co. KG, acting as a joint venture, were our clients. As the lead designer for the detailed design, OBERMEYER Infrastruktur took on a massive task, as this section accounted for over 70% of the total scope, making it by far the largest part of the overall project. Despite the enormous scale of the project, it was completed within an exceptionally tight timeframe. After just 10.5 months of planning and five months of intensive construction, the line was put back into service in December 2024, on schedule.
The project was carried out in close collaboration with our client and Deutsche Bahn. To efficiently manage the complex coordination of the numerous interdisciplinary trades, digital planning methods were employed, such as the digital coordination environment developed specifically for this purpose by OBERMEYER and used for the first time, alongside agile project management approaches. This enabled all plans to be verified against and coordinated with a 3D model of the existing infrastructure, created specifically on the basis of the survey carried out by OBERMEYER. At peak times, this enabled more than 100 designers to work simultaneously on the project. The planning tasks were distributed across seven technical disciplines, twelve OBERMEYER Infrastructure sites and five subcontractors, including HELIKA and HELLAS. Despite the high complexity of the project, all planning deliverables were approved for construction on time and to the required standard.
The scale of the project is also evident in the technical figures: as part of the construction work, 111 kilometres of track were renewed, 152 sets of points modernised, 619 signals installed or adapted, 130 kilometres of contact wire renewed, 383 catenary masts replaced and 20 stations modernised. The comprehensive refurbishment of the Riedbahn is therefore regarded as a pioneering reference project for the future modernisation of Deutsche Bahn’s high-speed rail network.
Technical Specifications
