Accusations swirl in fallout over Transrapid demise
FRANKFURT, March 31 (Reuters) - The abrupt demise of Germany's first commercial Transrapid maglev train route has sent all parties involved scurrying to avoid responsibility for the political fallout.
The prestige project designed to link downtown Munich, the country's third-largest city, with nearby Franz Josef Strauss Airport was meant to showcase German engineering prowess.
The magnetic levitation train link that would have carried passengers at speeds of over 400 kilometers an hour was scrapped after costs rose to more than 3 billion euros ($4.73 billion), from 1.85 billion anticipated in 2005.
Now all participants in the project are hurrying to deny responsibility for the project's failure, which has all but ended hopes of finding wide-spread commercial use for the technology developed by ThyssenKrupp (TKAG.DE) and Siemens (SIEGn.DE).
The German government and the state of Bavaria, due to foot the lion's share of the bill, blame a 1.5 billion euro spike in the realisation costs that arose in just the past six months.
Building group Hochtief (HOTG.DE) said it had nothing to do with the earlier estimate, originally stemming from a government feasibility study based on prices from 2004, and pointed to expensive legal requirements imposed by the authorities to protect quality of life among local inhabitants affected by the new train.
The longer than anticipated construction time and a sharp increase in costs of raw materials such as cement, steel, copper, oil as well as labour since 2004 led to the ballooning costs, it said.
Bavarian construction industry boss Gerhard Hess said German railway operator Deutsche Bahn on Friday was the guilty party, accusing it of signing off on an unrealistic estimate in September.
"The high costs are the result of a plan that alone lay in the hands of the Bahn," he said. "To make those that calculated costs competently responsible for the so-called explosion is not only easy, it's entirely backward."
The Bahn denied its planning was incomplete.
"This is obviously shifting responsibility. This attempt to pass the buck is just embarrassing," Bahn spokesman Oliver Schumacher said.
The Bahn claims that only marginal changes were made to the official approval of the plan that could not explain a sudden jump in costs.
ThyssenKrupp and Siemens say they stuck to budget.
Opposition leaders alleged that political motivations were the real reason why the government suddenly dumped the project.
The head of the pro-business Free Liberals, Guido Westerwelle, said the decision smelled of local politics on the part of the ruling Christian Social Union party in Bavaria "in order to bury an unloved project before the state election". Continued...
