“All wheels stand still if your strong arm wants it” – these lines from the federal song for the General German Workers’ Association from 1863 would serve well as a motto for the current train drivers’ strikes. The wheels of the train are literally standing still, and Claus Weselsky’s arm actually gives the impression of strength. We are currently experiencing the fifth warning strike in the current collective bargaining round, and further “wave strikes” are apparently in the pipeline.
Of course, Deutsche Bahn would be unimpressed if Weselsky went on strike alone. Apparently the majority of members of the German Locomotive Drivers’ Union (GDL) still support their chairman. His decisions are followed by the vast majority of train drivers. And in the last ballot on December 19, 2023, an overwhelming majority of 97 percent of GDL members voted for indefinite strikes. The rail passengers’ annoyance is not just due to Weselsky as a person, but to the group of train drivers.
The train drivers are apparently not quite aware that they are busy sawing the branch on which they are sitting. The railways are unlikely to allow themselves to be permanently held hostage to a single professional group. Their resistance will most likely have a strong technological component. The widespread hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) is probably exaggerated (memories of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s come to mind), but the potential to replace scarce skilled workers with IT-supported automation technologies is likely to be immense. This probably also applies especially to the transport sector.
In the public debate about autonomous driving, the perspectives for road traffic are at the forefront. A lot is happening here, but it will probably be some time before it is widely used in practice. In rail transport, on the other hand, the technical hurdles to getting started with autonomous driving are significantly lower. The demands on vehicle drivers in rail transport are much lower than in road transport. To put it bluntly, the tasks of a train driver essentially lie in accelerating and braking as well as appropriately observing the various route signals. The automation of these activities should be of manageable technological complexity, especially since automatic signal acquisition and processing in long-distance rail transport is already well advanced.
Perhaps this assessment of the core tasks of a train driver is too casual, as there are good reasons why training for this profession is normally scheduled for three years and even for career changers it takes around one year. The license to drive a road vehicle can be obtained much more quickly, which can be seen as an indication that the complexity of driving a locomotive may be somewhat higher. Nevertheless, the most demanding tasks in rail transport today lie primarily in signal boxes and less in driving operations.
In November 2022, the French locomotive manufacturer Alstom was able to demonstrate a fully automatic shunting locomotive together with the Dutch infrastructure operator ProRail and the Belgian freight railway Lineas. And in Nuremberg (where the legendary “Adler” heralded the beginning of the railway age in Germany in 1835) the work of the Technical University on autonomous driving in shunting services is well advanced. A feasibility study by the Nuremberg University of Technology presented in 2017 shows that the autonomous shunter is by no means a distant vision of the future.
According to reports, the automation of train traffic at Europe’s largest marshalling yard in Maschen near Hamburg has already progressed to such an extent that the first shunting locomotive has already become hopelessly lost in the thicket of the local rail network and has since disappeared without being found. On the other hand, there is better evidence of driverless subways, which have been in regular service in Nuremberg since 2008 and in Hamburg, among other places, since 2022.
How quickly Deutsche Bahn will push ahead with driverless train traffic depends not least on how great the problem pressure is on the company in the wake of the current tariff disputes. GDL leader Claus Weselsky is expected to retire in the summer of 2024. If he continues his current course with the current rigor, many of the train drivers he represents will soon follow him into (albeit involuntary) retirement.
Institute for the World Economy in Kiel (until 2017)