Romania, which under right-wing management pleased neocons not only by hosting a secret CIA prison but by introducing flat tax, too, was another non-Eurozone victim of the global financial crisis submitting to the IMF. Under populist President Traian Băsescu (re-elected in 2009 after a battle for power with parliament which he won conclusively) and his loyal PM Emil Boc (head of a minority government since Băsescu's re-election), an austerity policy was implemented. The IMF cure was credited with improved macroeconomic numbers last year, making Romania a poster boy for austerity advocates in other countries. That is, as long as the social destruction hidden by the macroeconomic numbers didn't manifest in visible dissent.

The resignation of a state secretary over a conflict regarding further reforms three weeks ago led to street protests and violent riots. With the background that, on one hand, the main government party already lost half of its supporters, on the other hand, the IMF's review was imminent, the government found itself in an impossible situation. So yesterday PM Boc and his ministers resigned, opening the way for a faux "expert government" headed by the former chief of the foreign intelligence service. The governing coalition also made nebulous promises about helping the poor hurt most by austerity.

While Hungary saw protests for or against a one-party state, and Romania saw protests and violent riots against austerity measures, in Slovakia, there are protests against gorillas (photo below from Bumm.sk).

The protests follow the December 2011 internet publication of documents purporting to be the summary of secret service observations of a conspirational meeting place conducted in the years 2005-2006 under the codename 'Gorila'. If true, they reveal something all hardcore leftists would assume to be the reality behind the façade of parliamentary democracies: the backroom dealing of a large conglomerate to control economic policies and politicians themselves.

Both the right-wing parties who governed in 1998-2006 (and were swept from power after social spending cutbacks and other neolib reforms like the 'flat tax') and are the main constituents of the present caretaker government, and the populist parties who governed in 2006-2010 and are to return in the 10 March snap elections are tainted. Only SaS, the neoliberal party that blew up the coalition over its partners' support for the EFSF Eurozone bailout fund, is not affected (and now tries its all to exploit the scandal in the election campaign).

Themes this time: China after the Wenzhou crash, new and upgraded lines, tilting trains, and Moscow urban transport.

Railway Gazette: Design flaws and poor management caused Wenzhou collision, report confirms

CHINA: Investigators have confirmed that 'serious design flaws' in the signalling and train control equipment, along with 'sloppy management and the mishandling of a lightning strike' were among the reasons for the collision between two high speed trains near Wenzhou on July 23 2011 in which 40 people died.

An attempt to condense the failures and non-fail-safe features mentioned or implied by the article:

• Lightning strikes offed a lot of signalling and train control equipment along the track.
  
• The identification of signal malfunctions for the control centre was up to a human, and he missed one out of four.
  
• The key failure was that of a so-called track circuit (which detects a train's presence ahead of a signal), something the train control centre software was not prepared to notice and warn about, thus the train that was hit could 'disappear'.
  
• The train that was hit had progressed past the malfunctioning signals at speeds below 20 km/h (practically at sight) as intended, yet it was braked automatically (just in the section of the undetected malfunctioning track circuit).
  
• With signalling failing, the trains were dispatched by radio, a normal fallback level, but the train dispatcher responsible had to control ten trains all at the same time.
  
• The stopped train could not reach the dispatcher by radio.
  
• The stopped train did manage to move again, and thus it did re-appear on the screens of the dispatchers, who did attempt to contact the approaching second train, but failed.

The broad international coverage of the 2 January protest against the new constitution of Hungary (see Protest in a one-party state) did achieve one thing: a shocking realisation on the part of the Hungarian Right that they lost control of the streets.

In the eight years of the so-called 'center-left' in government, 2002-2010, right-populist Fidesz (which now governs with a two-thirds majority in parliament) and the multitude of far-right groups and grouplets (in always changing alliances) resorted to street politics, from blockades through mass rallies to riots, and 'won' on that front well before an election victory. But now they woke to the reality of CNN et al showing tens of thousands protesting in the streets while prime minister Viktor Orbán attended a closed-door celebration and then left through the back door.

Thus, right-wing circles were abuzz with calls for counter-protests, as a demonstration of force, a re-taking of the streets. The right-wing protests staged thus far were less than spectacular, but the expected bigger ones are still to come, the first this Saturday (21 January). The government has also tried to thwart anti-government protests in various ways. But the organisers of those weren't short of ideas, either – the title refers to their latest trick.

All the while, parliamentary opposition parties again don't shine: the Green party LMP is mired in internal conflict over cooperation with the successors of the previous government (resulting in high-profile resignations); while much-reviled former Socialist PM and present leader of a breakaway party, Ferenc Gyurcsány, had no better idea than to insist on the necessity of severe austerity measures and social 'reforms' after the overthrow of a Fidesz government. So, with the background of market attack, IMF talks and legal review by the European Commission, protests and counter-protests will now be the main game in town until at least the middle of March.

Last year, one of the most popular politicians of Germany, the political star of the Bavarian CSU, federal defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was forced to resign when he was shown to have plagiarised most of his doctoral thesis, earning him the nickname "zu Googleberg" (see for example discussion in Spiegel vs. Bild). Much of the work to uncover and catalogue the plagiarisms was done by a Wiki community, which went on to expose a number of other, lesser politicians.

Now there is another high-profile victim – in Hungary. He is the current holder of Hungary's ceremonial head of state office, the President of the Republic (a misnomer since the republic was abolished at the start of the year). He is Pál Schmitt, a puppet of the governing right-pupulist Fidesz party as President (he never made use of his Presidential power to send laws for a check before signing them) and previously as MEP. Before politics, he held various top positions in the International Olympic Committee. And that's the time and context for his plagiarism.

Business paper HVG found that in Schmitt's 1992 doctoral thesis, about 180 out of a total of 215 pages were lifted large parts from a 1985 article by a fellow sports diplomat and historian from Bulgaria. Another page was lifted from another article co-authored by the same author. The plagiarised works are indicated (in incorrect form) in a bibliography, but there are no quote marks or footnotes to indicate where they were used.

Last month I took on the subject of rail privatisation and deregulation in the EU in The Dawn Of Open Access (1/2) and (2/2). In the January 2012 issue of International Railway Journal, there are feature articles about two of the new private long-distance passenger operators bringing competition to the former state monopolists. In line with my gravest predictions, one of these articles includes a quote in which a manager calls for the privatisation of profits and the socialisation of losses. The other includes a quote providing some insight into why the most new ventures have it so difficult to launch.

In the first instalment after Christmas and New Year, I bring news grouped in the following themes: light-rail successes, electrification in France, export successes, and Chinese high-speed. Let's start with light rail:

Railway Gazette: Caen to switch to light rail

FRANCE: On December 14 Caen transport authority Viacités confirmed its intention to abandon its TVR rubber-tyred guided light transit route and replace it with conventional light rail by 2018.

...Following completion of the network at a cost of €215m, local operator Twisto began TVR operations in November 17 2002 under a 30-year concession. This was two years after a similar TVR service began in Nancy. However, the TVR technology has proved unreliable, and is no longer being actively supported by the manufacturers.

Ideological and road-lobby-funded opponents of the light rail revival in the USA, who found followers in Europe and Australia too, have championed various alternatives using road vehicles, all of which turned out to be unworkable. The TVR system was among the most advanced (along with the Translohr system, see Local Rail Extras II): rather than a propped-up bus, it is a 'propped-down' electric ligh rail vehicle rolling on rubber tyres on asphalt, but with a guiding rail in the middle of its path. One problem is that the vehicles have axleloads higher than normal buses yet always roll on the exact same path, resulting in strong and uneven road wear and bad ride quality. Stuff getting under the wheels and keeping on the guiding rails in curves are problematic, too.

The scandals engulfing Germany's figurehead, Federal President Christian Wulff, elicited considerable discussion in the Salon yesterday, so here is a diary to continue the discussion, with a short summary of the main facts for a wider audience.

Summary of the summary: the media first attacked Wulff over various 'gifts' he received from businessman friends before he was President, then for his way of always admitting only what was already in the public, then for his attempt to supress the first media report that launched the scandal. While Wulff's career is on the line, the bigger question marks are over the motivations of the media group that set off and fuelled the scandal, the person of Wulff's eventual successor and the re-shuffle that would bring in the really important political positions, and the future of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her current conservative-liberal coalition government.

A new constitution created by Hungary's right-wing government of PM Viktor Orbán's right-populist Fidesz party took effect on 1 January 2012. It is the culmination of a legal coup that de facto abolished the separation of powers, replaced the republic with a state based on blood-and-earth nationalism and clericalism, cemented a crazy mix of economic policies, and effectively created a one-party state; but the only part that elicited significant protest abroad was the elimination of central bank independence.

On 2 January, the government held a lavish celebration of the new constitution in Budapest's Opera House – while a mass protest supported by all anti-government NGOs and non-far-right opposition parties was held outside (also attended by yours truly).

Europe and its public discourse are in the grip of austerity, but the events in Hungary don't easily fit into its narratives. Perhaps "what comes after austerity" is the best connection: the cycle of austerity started here well before the Global Financial Crisis, and the current powers-that-be rode popular discontent with a Socialist government toeing the IMF line. Fidesz's focus however is not on the economy but on total power, and their programme of takeover started over a decade ago. This is the same phase as the era of the Kaczyński twins in Poland, except Orbán won't lose power easily.

Below the fold, a summary of the situation and a protest report.

Some European high-speed rail news this time.

Railway Gazette: CAF tests prototype Oaris high speed train

SPAIN: A four-car prototype of CAF's Oaris high speed train is undergoing trials on the Madrid - Sevilla route, where testing will include operation at up to 352 km/h. Numbered No 105 001 by RENFE, at the manufacturer's suggestion the prototype was delivered in place of the last of an order for Class 120 trainsets.

It's not just Chinese and Korean manufacturers that try to compete with traditional rail technology majors. CAF, a company based in Beasain, Basque Country, is one of Spain's two passenger rail vehicle manufacturers (the other being Talgo). Just recently, it entered the German market as DB chose it alongside Alstom and Stadler (another up-and-comer from Switzerland) for a framework agreement about 400 new regional electric multiple units.

CAF's Oaris (which I mentioned here) is another part of this effort. CAF entered the high-speed market as local partner for Alstom to make 250 km/h trains (the Class 120), then owned the technology, then evolved the design into this 320 km/h train. In another similarity with China, the effort was helped by a government-funded research project.

It is also noteworthy that this is a "nothing fancy" design: no low floors, no articulation, no special nose shape, just the essentials.

As regular readers of the European Tribune know, user someone wrote an extension of the Firefox browser, TribExt, for easier blogging on the site (downloadable via its link in the blue background box in the sidebar). Firefox having switched to fast development with a regular schedule for releasing new versions, we have to check for compatibility and release a new version every few months even if there are no new features.

The latest version I'm now releasing is now compatible up to Firefox 10 (Firefox 9 is to be released on 20 December 2011, Firefox 10 on 31 January 2012). This included no other change than editing the file name and re-setting the extension name and maxversion values in the file install.rdf, since I found no issues in the developer notes. However, if you find any bugs, please report it.

A more significant change is that I fixed a bug that haunted many of us since Firefox 3: a failure of dynamic rating which affected only some computers. Dynamic rating should now work for everyone. If you are interested in the details: I finally found that this is caused by unmarking the "Accept third party cookies" checkbox in Tools > Options > Privacy (you can also find that preference as "network.cookie.cookieBehavior" in about:config, with values of 1 or above causing the problem). Our bug is related to Bugzilla@Mozilla - Bug 437174, which led to a fix implemented in FF3.6 and later, providing for a workaround which TribExt now implements. Consequently, I also bumped minversion (the oldest version of Firefox this new TribExt will work with) to 3.6.

Direct download link: tribext01234_4FF10.xpi

Railways in the EU are subject to a much more fundamental reform than the establishment of TEN-T corridors: a policy of deregulation, with the intention of moving from a world of national railways to one of private train-operating companies competing on tracks accessible to all and managed separately. This is the principle of "open access". In the first part of this series, I detailed what open access is about and how it compares to other models of rail privatisation, and reviewed the experience with open access in railfreight, which is a legal as well as practical reality for years now.

Open access in long-distance passenger transport started more recently. In most countries, the legal prerequisites were in place two years ago, but the market didn't develop as intended. There have been few enterprises trying to make use of open access, and those who did were beset by problems. Significant open-access competitors are starting up only in recent months (most of them tomorrow on 11 December), the apropos for this diary, which contains a critical review of every single venture I'm aware of (so everyone can read the parts for the countries s/he travels in).

A series 575 ".Italo" (Alstom AGV) high-speed train of Italian open-access operator NTV at the company's newly built maintenance base near Naples in July 2011. Photo from Ferpress.

Hearing "EU transport policy", most people would first think of TEN-T, that is, the trans-European transport corridors which are to be prioritized according to EU treaties and are supported with EU funds. However, in the rail sector, the EU instigated something much more fundamental: there is a policy of deregulation, which involved several successive reforms over the past 20 years, resulting in a total reorganisation of a sector once consisting of monopolistic and integrated national (or regional) railways.

The intended end state is (was?) complete "open access", that is, the free competition of (private) train operating companies on any railway track. This is a thoroughly neoliberal reform, sold with the usual predictions of increased efficiency and affordability. However, those arguments had an effect on a wide array of policy-makers, from national conservatives hoping to relieve public budgets by drawing in private capital to Greens hoping for a shift from road and air to rail.

Open access for railfreight is a reality for years already; now it's the turn of a sector more visible for the general public: long-distance passenger transport. In the first part of this two-part series, I'll establish some context by describing the different forms of rail privatisation, to underline what open access is about; then say a few words about how things turned out for railfreight. The second part will be about the new open-access passenger railways.

Adria Transport 1216 920 (a Siemens ES64U4) heads for Vienna with a cargo of steel beams (own photo). Adria Transport is a joint venture of the Port of Koper (Slovenia) and regional railway GKB (Austria) for open-access freight transports.

This week, I comment news on bottlenecks for freight in Europe and the USA, privatisation in Russia, and the final section in the reconstruction of the Istanbul-Ankara line in Turkey.

Railway Gazette: HS1 open to Eurotunnel

UK: Eurotunnel announced on December 1 that its Europorte Channel subsidiary had been granted approval to operate its fleet of Class 92 locomotives on High Speed 1. Driver training is now in progress with the expectation that commercial freight services will be launched early in 2012.

...Clearance for use on HS1, able to accommodate standard European wagons and swap bodies, opens the prospect of only one locomotive change on international services between Britain and Europe, given that the Class 92 is already approved for operation on Network Rail, but not on the RFF network in France.

And the Class 92 is the only loco approved for the Chunnel. Now the key obstacle for more efficient Britain-rest-of-Europe freight transport by rail will be the French infrastructure manager.

Stuttgart 21 is a rail project to replace the surface terminus of Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg state in Germany, with an underground through station. The controversy over its costs and usefulness, and its real estate, environmental and historical building preservation aspects, peaked in mass protests that met excessive police force, and contributed to the election of Germany's first Greens-led regional government earlier this year.

To settle the subsequent tussle over the future of the project, the state of Baden-Württemberg held a referendum yesterday (Sunday, 27 November). At a turnout of 48.3%, a majority of 58.8% rejected the state's withdrawal of its financial contribution (which would have effectively killed the project). Even in Stuttgart itself, Stuttgart 21 supporters had a majority of 52.9%. Prime minister Winfried Kretschman said his government accepts the people's decision, but the state won't contribute to the financing of further cost overruns and will continue to ensure the right of protest.

Below the fold, some background, and for a wider context, some other news on transport policy in Germany, which don't point in a good direction.

Again after some hiatus, a greater number of news with commentary. This time, on UK to Spain truck transport plans, a cross-border commuter rail line, Britain's antiquated rail infrastructure, metro automation, switch to rail in developing world countries, and spending cuts in the USA.

Railway Gazette: Modalohr piggyback wagons approved for Channel Tunnel

The decision would enable planned Autoroute Ferroviaire Atlantique piggyback services to be extended to the UK, 'potentially bringing significant new traffic'. Autoroute Ferroviaire Atlantique is proposed to link Irún in Spain with Paris and Lille...

The Modalohr system is a more advanced truck transport system than the standard European RoLa system: the trucks reside in separate 'pallets' which are rotated relative to the underframes at the terminals, thus all cars can be loaded at the same time, and semitrailer trucks don't have to be taken on the train and idle. (There are three more similar new systems, but Modalohr is the only one that proved itself in years of regular service; also see this Salon comment.)

What started with a bank robbery ended up as the solution to several murder cases, and tied up some of the worst failures of law enforcement of recent times in Germany into one bundle. It sounds like the plot of a bad Hollywood thriller:

• On 4 November, two men committed a bank robbery in Eisenach, Thuringia state. The same day, apparently after hearing that police is tracking their camper van, the two men committed suicide and set their camper van on fire. Still on the same day, in Zwickau, Saxony state, a woman set up a bomb and blew up the flat she shared with the two men (photo below from taz; the woman gave herself up to police four days later).
  

• The burnt-out camper van contained a whole arsenal, among them the weapon of a policewoman killed at a parking lot in Heilbronn, Baden-Württenberg state, in 2007. That case is infamous because for months, police followed the trail of a female serial killer who left her DNA at dozens of crime scenes, only to find that the DNA belonged to a careless employee of the manufacturer of probe-taking cotton-wool tips (see contemporary report).

• Another weapon found in the camper vanblown-up flat was used in the so-called 'Doner Kebab Stall Murders' (Dönerbuden-Morde), an unsolved series of nine murders between 2000 and 2006, in which six Turkish, two Turkish-German and one Greek small business owners were killed by head shots in broad daylight.

• The trio itself was identified as a cell of a militant Thuringian neo-Nazi group who were on the run ever since early 1998, when local police found a bomb factory in a flat owned by the woman.

• The leader of the militant neo-Nazi group they were part of was also a regional leader of the neo-Nazi party NPD, and had a prime role in the 2003 failure to ban the party. The ban attempt was based on evidence gathered by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, it turned out however that their informers sat high up in the party in leadership positions. For the trial, that meant that evidence became inadmissible, as there was no way to tell whether any of the party's evidenced ill intentions was put in at the behest of the informers' minders. But the situation was worse, because the informers could apparently exploit their situation to act with impunity, be it because of naivety on the part of authorities or a loss of scale in sticking to good sources.

• One of the two men who committed suicide in the camper van was an informer himselfAccording to unconfirmed rumours, the surviving woman was an informer herself. Which throws up the question of how the trio could escape in 1998.

So there was a terrorist cell in the past 14 years who lived and murdered under false names just like a cell of the far-left RAF (also known under the misnomer "Baader-Meinhof Gang") in the seventies-eighties. After the Gypsy-hunters in Hungary and the bomber and youth camp slaughterer in Norway, those who equate Islam and terrorism are again shown to have a blind eye for a more 'home-grown' form of terrorism.

As I write this, the top article on the website of the Berlin-based alternative-left daily die tageszeitung (short taz) is an interview with a banker who speaks like a flaming leftie. He first attacks the big banks as responsible for the global crisis with all their speculation (contrasting with his own Sparda-Bank Munich, a savings bank with a business model that originated as a self-help association of railwaymen), greeting the moves for recapitalisation, separation of investment and commercial banking, and financial transaction tax. Then he goes further:

Sparda-Bank-Chef über Finanzwesen: "Das Alte muss zusammenbrechen" - taz.de		Sparda-Bank CEO on the financial system: "The Old must collapse" - taz.de
Und damit wären wir vor weiteren Krisen gewappnet?		And that way, we would be prepared for another crisis?
Nein. Das Ganze muss noch weiter gehen. Die Verteilungsfrage muss vor die Wachstumsfrage gestellt werden. Die Bevölkerung muss wieder am Produktivitätswachstum beteiligt werden, um die Binnenwirtschaft anzukurbeln. Es ist ein Fehler, dass in Deutschland in den vergangenen Jahren kurzfristig gedacht und nur auf die Exportwirtschaft gesetzt wurde. Die Stabilität eines Systems ist nur dann gewährleistet, wenn es aus der Vielfalt entsteht. Um es mit der Metapher des Waldes zu sagen: Eine Monokultur, die aus Fichten oder Tannen besteht, wird sehr schnell wachsen und sie werden kurzfristig hohe Erträge generieren. Aber wenn ein Sturm in diesen Wald fährt, wird jeder Forstwirt bestätigen, dass dieser Wald am stärksten gefährdet ist, ein Mischwald hingegen sehr viel stabiler ist. Nicht die Effizienz steht im Vordergrund, sondern die Vielfalt.		No. The whole thing has to go even further. The question of distribution must be asked before the growth question. The population needs to have its share in productivity growth again in order to stimulate the domestic economy. It was a mistake for us in Germany in recent years to think short-term and bet only on the export sector. The stability of a system is only guaranteed if it arises out of diversity. To say it with the metaphor of the forest: a monoculture which consists of spruce or fir trees will grow very quickly and they will generate high returns in the short term. But would a storm run into this forest, any forester would confirm that such a forest would be most at risk, while a mixed forest would be much more stable. It's not efficiency that's in the foreground, but diversity.
Wie wollen Sie diese Veränderung erreichen?		How do you want to achieve this change?
Die Politik müsste zugeben, sich geirrt zu haben. Wir brauchen eine Kehrtwende. Statt der einzelwirtschaftlichen benötigen wir eine gesamtwirtschaftliche Betrachtung. Nur wenn wir unsere Leistungsbilanzüberschüsse abbauen, können die Südländer, die derzeit in der Krise stecken, überhaupt Leistungsbilanzüberschüsse generieren. Und nur so können sie ihre Staatsschulden zurückbezahlen.		Politics would have to admit to have been wrong. We need a paradigm shift. Instead of the microeconomic focus we need an overall economic one. The southern countries which now are stuck in cricis can generate current account surpluses only if we reduce our own current account surpluses. And that's the only way they can repay their sovereign debt.
Deutschland soll also weniger erwirtschaften, damit die anderen EU-Staaten mehr erwirtschaften können?		That is, Germany should produce less so that the other EU countries can produce more?
Dass Deutschland heute so gut dasteht, ist auch auf Kosten der Südländer geschehen. In Deutschland gab es in den vergangenen 15 bis 20 Jahren keine Lohnsteigerung. Ich dachte auch viele Jahre lang, dass das richtig ist. Man kann über Jahre hinweg den falschen Weg gehen, wenn die Masse sagt, dass das der richtige ist. Bis es irgendwann Fukushima macht. Es braucht ein so extremes Ereignis, damit wir verstehen, dass wir die Richtung ändern müssen. Wir müssen erkennen, dass das Totschlagargument, der Markt werde es richten, nicht mehr haltbar ist.		The fact that Germany is in such a good situation today has also happened at the expense of the southern countries. In Germany there was no wage increase in the last 15 to 20 years. I, too, thought for many years that this is right. One can go the wrong way for years if the crowd says that this is the right one. Until it eventually does a Fukushima. It takes a that much extreme event for us to understand that we need to change direction. We must realize that the killer argument that the market will right it is no longer tenable.

From last Monday (24 October), top speed was raised from 300 to 310 km/h on more than half of the Madrid-Barcelona high-speed line, and the fastest journey time reduced by eight minutes to 2 hours 30 minutes. Further improvements are to follow. However, when construction of the Madrid-Barcelona line began, the goal was to run trains at up to 350 km/h and under 2 hours 25 minutes from 2002. This nine-year delay was connected to the delayed commissioning of a safety system deployed along the line: European Train Control System Level 2 (ETCS L2).

ETCS with its different levels is itself part of (but the main part of) the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS), which is the costliest and potentially most important technical initiative of EU bodies at creating a railway network with national borders as 'transparent' as on highways. The roll-out of ERTMS/ETCS has been fraught with problems and was much slower than originally envisaged across the EU. The fact that level 2 of the system finally goes into operation in Spain has significance as a vote of confidence. To establish what this is all about, I use the occasion to write about train control systems for a general audience.

Due to a conference, a short holiday, a busy week and writing a long diary, the second instalment comes after more than two weeks with a larger number of news. Covered: new tunnels on the Belgian-German border, and into Kashmir, the undead idea of PPP, Spanish success in Saudi Arabia, numbers game over Stuttgart 21, a German train in France, freight tram in Paris, trams in Basle, and a hybrid power plant.

Alter Buschtunnel bei Aachen wieder in Betrieb- Nachrichten bei Eurailpress		Old Buschtunnel in Aachen back in service - News at Eurailpress
Seit dem 23.10.2011 ist der Alte Buschtunnel zwischen Aachen und der belgischen Grenze nach den umfangreichen Sanierungsarbeiten in Betrieb genommen worden.		Since[sic!] 23/10/2011, the old Buschtunnel between Aachen and the Belgian border has been put into operation after extensive renovation work.
Damit ist die Strecke zwischen Aachen und Liege wieder komplett zweigleisig...		With that, the line between Liege and Aachen is again completely double-tracked...

This tunnel was a bottleneck on the Cologne-Brussels line. It first got a new, second, single-track tube, then all the traffic was re-routed there while the old two-track tunnel was rebuilt with a single, lowered track (the above Wikimedia photo was made then).