Plans to improve a 4 km stretch of railway in southern Germany have been awarded five million euros by the EU.
The project, which will upgrade an existing two-track railway line north of Nuremburg to a four-track electrified line, will form part of a new trans-European (TEN) high-speed corridor once it is completed in 2014.
The new TEN rail link will connect northern Italy with Scandinavia, running through Austria to Munich before continuing on upgraded and new lines to Berlin.
Upgrading the 4 km section will relieve an existing bottleneck and allow both freight and passenger traffic to use the line at the same time.
A total of 13 billion euros is being invested in the new Munich-Berlin corridor.
The improvements will significantly reduce the journey time between the two cities to four hours – half the time it took before work started in 1992.
