The current coalition agreement of the traffic light coalition states: "In the case of particularly high-priority projects, the federal government should in future provide for short deadlines for issuing the planning approval decision, following the example of the Federal Immission Control Act". This also applies to the "Optimized Alpha-E plus Bremen", as the HHBH rail project is officially called in the Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan. This underlines the importance of the major project in terms of federal policy, and we had the pleasure of welcoming its head, Matthias Hudaff from DB Netz AG, as part of the "Project Management 1" lecture on 17.01.2023.

Even though construction of the first project sections will not begin until 2031 at the earliest, around 300 experts are already involved in the current preliminary planning. The aim of the project is to expand the network in the Hamburg-Bremen-Hanover area. This is because in future, 25 percent of the total volume of rail traffic in Germany will be handled in the HHBH project area - based on current traffic forecasts. The preliminary planning for Hamburg - Hanover was only recently completed and a comparative report on the four fundamentally possible routes between Hamburg and Hanover was submitted to the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV).

In the Deutsche Bahn network, the overall project has an outstanding function for international long-distance and freight traffic, especially for seaport-hinterland traffic. In view of the existing and predicted bottlenecks and the associated loss of quality in local, long-distance and freight traffic, the expansion and new construction is an operationally urgent and important measure in terms of transport policy. A key challenge of the project is to communicate the planning findings to elected representatives at local, state and federal level. In this context, dealing with citizens' initiatives also plays a central role. Mr. Hudaff's presentation provided our students with very vivid and engaging insights into the practice of project management. This gave the students an authentic insight into the challenges that arise every day when managing external stakeholders, but also when leading and managing a large number of employees in a dynamic project.