Germany has ditched plans to build a flagship high-speed rail link between the Bavarian capital Munich and its airport because of ballooning costs, Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said on Thursday.
The Transrapid, one of the world's fastest trains, was developed over the last three decades by German engineers at Siemens and ThyssenKrupp but so far the technology has been used commercially only in China.
Tiefensee told reporters that industry estimated the cost of building the link would be as much as 3.4 billion euros ($5.37 billion) compared with the 1.85 billion euros originally earmarked, mainly due to the expense of building the track.
Munich airport is Germany's second-biggest after Frankfurt and Lufthansa's second most important German hub, yet passengers need almost an hour to get to the centre of Munich from the airport.
The federal government had pledged up to 925 million euros and the state of Bavaria, home to Siemens, around 500 million. A Transrapid train crashed on a test run in Germany in 2006, killing 23 people but investigators blamed human error.
About 1,000 jobs would have been created if the project had gone ahead, Thomas Schlenz, head of ThyssenKrupp workers' council told Die Welt newspaper, but the decision to scrap the Munich plans would not lead to any job cuts.
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