Did German national railway company Deutsche Bahn (DB) stop using all electric engines, switching back to diesel? No, that's not true: It is just the DB operator in the United Kingdom -- which has fewer locomotives than its German parent -- that had stopped using electric locomotives for freight due to high costs of maintenance.
The claim originated in a video (archived here) published on TikTok by @openworldfoundation on August 9, 2023.
The narrator says (translated from Slovak to English by Lead Stories staff):
Let's talk about Germany. Germans have realized that the price of electricity is enormous. DB Cargo had announced yesterday that it's pulling all its electric locomotives replacing them with diesel ones.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Aug 29 14:53:12 2023 UTC)
DB Cargo UK phased out its fleet of 24 electric locomotives in July 2023 because of high maintenance and electricity costs in the country. The DB operator in the U.K. runs a total of 228 diesel and electric locomotives, while the parent company in Germany runs 2,686 locomotives and is working on replacing more diesel engines with electric ones.
