From Monday, April 8, the S-Bahn ring in Berlin will be closed between Greifswalder Straße and Schönhauser Allee. If you are travelling this route, you will need to factor in extra journey time.

Temporary S-Bahn closures in Berlin

In order to carry out major building works, this eastern stretch of the S-Bahn ring will be closed from Monday, April 8 until Monday, May 20. During this time, replacement buses will be in operation to enable passengers to complete their journeys.

From April 15 to April 29, the section between Schönhauser Allee and Gesundbrunnen will also be closed. The lines affected are S41, S42, S47, S26, S8, S85 and S9.

Major improvements needed

The eastern part of the Ring is one of the busiest stretches in Germany’s capital, transporting around 160.000 passengers each day. During peak periods, trains run every three minutes on rails that were last renewed in the mid-1980s.

They have now reached the end of their service life and must be replaced, along with the power supply and signalling technology. The work will be carried out during the day so as not to disturb local residents, but these shorter working hours mean that the whole project will take longer.

Investments in Berlin’s travel infrastructure

This improvement work comes as part of a major, 522 million euro investment in public transportation in Berlin and Brandenburg. Funded by long-distance train operator Deutsche Bahn, around 6.400 individual projects are currently ongoing across the region in an effort to improve capacity, reliability and punctuality.

There are also plans to make all of Berlin’s stations barrier-free. Currently, 94 percent have platforms that can be reached steplessly from the street, but Deutsche Bahn wants to bring this figure to 100 percent.