Concrete measures are the basis of every building block of the Strong Rail strategy. A “construction manager” was named for the operational management of each building block, who is accountable to the Management Board for designing the measures and their operational implementation. The building blocks were incorporated in DB Group’s mid-term plan. We monitor contributions to targets with key performance indicators on a continuous basis.

The basis are the transport policy sector targets of the Federal Government:

• doubling volume sold in rail passenger transport,
• increasing rail’s market share of freight transport to 25%.

In addition, the German Federal Government’s climate policy objectives are being supported by the switch of traction current to 100% renewable energies, the electrification of railway tracks and the purchase of alternatively driven or hybrid-driven locomotives.

We use the relevant key performance indicators to pursue the achievement of our Strong Rail strategic targets. In 2023, we further refined these measures and will in future consider 14 instead of ten DB-specific targets in the context of Strong Rail. In this way, we aim to better measure and steer the status of our Strong Rail strategy:

• Infrastructure: One important addition to the content is adding the condition grade for the high-performance network to the set of top targets. The strong focus on improving the condition of the infrastructure is therefore also represented in our top targets, and progress in the general modernization is made measurable using comprehensible grade-style logic.
• Passenger transport: The punctuality of the whole journey at DB Long-Distance is being added as a new top goal in order to not only measure operational quality, but also measure performance from the customer’s point of view in our top targets. We are therefore also guided by industry standards, as in air travel, for example.
• Sustainability: In order to increase ESG compliance, our top employee targets will also be expanded to include the share of women in leadership and to include absolute greenhouse gas emissions in the area of climate.

As well as these additions, we are making two changes to the content:

• Shift in the mode of transport: In order to record the shift effects at DB Long-Distance even more precisely, we are using volume sold measured in passenger kilometers (pkm) instead of the number of passengers.
• Customer satisfaction: We are changing how we present customer satisfaction from satisfaction index (SI) points to an easier-to-understand grade system. This also aligns us with industry-standard benchmarks.