Until now, the Deutschlandtakt has been regarded purely as a planning instrument for infrastructure development. With the current legislative period, Deutschlandtakt sees itself as a new overall strategy of the federal government for a reliable and efficient rail of the future. In addition to the expansion and construction of new infrastructure (capacity expansion), questions of capacity distribution and utilization are also addressed. Both the interests of rail passenger and rail freight transport are equally taken into account in the Deutschlandtakt.

With the Deutschlandtakt, the federal government has made a paradigm shift, especially in the area of rail infrastructure planning. The complete implementation of the Deutschlandtakt will take place in stages (expansion stages) with successive provision of the necessary infrastructure. The approach is "first the roadmap, then the infrastructure". The target timetable is the federal government's strategic planning instrument for deriving the tailor-made rail infrastructure. In this way, it can be transparently shown at which points the rail network needs to be accelerated or expanded with precision. The Deutschlandtakt target timetable shows which transport services can be achieved in the long term and which infrastructures are needed for this.

In order to further concretise and implement the Deutschlandtakt in the future, the question therefore also arises as to to what extent and in what form the service concepts on which the timetable-based step-by-step infrastructure expansion is based can be realised in the future by railway undertakings acting on their own economic merits.

The aim of this study is to identify possibilities and approaches for the future operational implementation of timetable concepts in the German cycle. At the same time, an appropriate basis for decision-making on how to proceed with the operational implementation of a nationwide Deutschlandtakt in line with the offer vision of the Deutschlandtakt target timetable must also be created. Both the SPV and the SGV must be included in the considerations.

In order to answer this question, the study on the implementation of timetable concepts in the Deutschlandtakt in the context of concrete transport offers is to develop an overview of different approaches (work package 1), evaluate them (work package 2), derive recommendations for action and prioritise them (work package 3).

Please refer to the published documents for the details of the tender, in particular the service description and the bidder information.