Last Mile, Long Game
Interview with Kai Ebert, Founder & CEO of LWS Lappwaldbahn Service GmbH
Germany’s rail network makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. But far from the main lines and major stations, a quieter story is unfolding: small private operators stitching together the freight connections that the big players abandoned. LWS Lappwaldbahn Service GmbH is one of them – and after 17 years of steadily expanding its network of non-federal rail infrastructure, it has become one of the ten largest operators of its kind in Germany.
The company’s origins trace back not to a business plan, but to a Brussels mandate. When EU rail legislation required operators to separate track management from train operations, founder and managing director Kai Ebert saw both an obligation and an opportunity. In 2009, he spun off the infrastructure activities into a dedicated entity and LWS was born. What followed was methodical expansion: the rehabilitation of the Lappwald line, the construction of a specialist rail workshop, and successive takeovers including the Teutoburger Waldbahn, the Westerwaldbahn, and most recently the Wiehltalbahn. Today, LWS manages 120 km of track with 45 employees – small by any measure, yet firmly in the national Top 10.
The Last Mile Nobody Wanted
LWS operates what the industry calls the ‘last mile’. The branch lines connecting factories and industrial sites to the main network, progressively abandoned by DB InfraGo. “The mistake,” Kai Ebert argues, “is assuming that freight originates at Munich Central or Berlin Central. It doesn’t, it comes from industrial sites along lines that were cut off.”
Once a shipper switches to road, he warns, it rarely comes back. LWS runs its network on a fully non-discriminatory basis: DB Cargo and private carriers alike access its tracks at equal tariffs, regulated by the Federal Network Agency.
Digitizing the Analog Railway
Despite operating in what Ebert cheerfully calls “old economy,” LWS has driven two significant digitalization projects. One is a software platform for managing non-federal rail infrastructure, now adopted by several operators. The other is more striking: across Germany’s non-federal network, dispatchers still record every train movement by hand with coloured lines drawn on paper forms, unchanged for generations – the so-called Train Movement Log (FV NE standard). Kai Ebert has spent over ten years pushing to replace it with a digital system. “This year, we’ll finally be able to announce the product together with Sternico GmbH and VDV,” he says.
Bureaucracy as the Bigger Rival
A workshop extension urgently needed to handle growing order volumes has been waiting on a planning response for four and a half years. Safety upgrades for more than 50 level crossings face timelines of five to eight years each. Federal funding exists, but private operators must provide personal guarantees to access it: an obligation municipal competitors are exempt from. “We’ve been fighting alongside the VDV for ten years to get that changed,” Kai Ebert says. “It keeps coming up in Berlin and keeps getting buried under the next crisis.”