As Europe gets hotter, its transportation systems struggle to cope

Rail services are being cut, tracks are buckling and highways are cracking as Europe's ageing transport infrastructure struggles with increasingly intense heatwaves.

Tracks are buckling in Sweden. Highways are cracking in Germany. Commuters are sweltering in airless train carriages across the world’s fastest-warming continent. This is the new reality in Europe, where much of the transportation infrastructure was not built to withstand the scorching su-mmer heat that’s becoming routine. 

“Europe’s transport systems were engineered for a climate that no longer exists,” Patrice Geoffron, who leads the energy and climate economics team at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL in France, wrote in an email. Rail services in Britain and France reduced services this week and warned of disruptions as Western Europe endured its fifth heatwave since May. The changes needed to fully accommodate the effects of global warming would require vast amounts of money.  

“The main challenge is actually not heat; the main challenge is funding itself,” said Prof Felix Creutzig of the University of Sussex, who leads the working group on cities at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin. 

Disruptions from the heat are most obvious on Europe’s trains. Many of these rail systems are generations old, said Ian Mulcahey, the global director of cities at Gensler, an international architecture and planning firm. (London’s metro, the world’s oldest, opened in 1863.) 

Many of these systems still rely, to some degree, on dated infrastructure. Many European train carriages don’t have air-conditioning. 

Some systems are incorporating new technologies as they expand and update. Mulcahey pointed to the air-conditioned Elizabeth Line in London, a major east-west artery that opened in 2022 and cost about 19 billion pounds ($25.5 billion). Others are making smaller changes.  France’s state-owned railway operator, for instance, says it is adapting stations for extreme weather. But it’s not possible to start from scratch. “The challenge for us in Europe is, how do you go back and retrospectively adapt your infrastructure for a new age?,” said Mulcahey, who specialises in large-scale city planning. 

On Thursday, a train derailed near Lewes, in southern England, injuring two, as Britain recorded its hottest day of the summer so far. It was not immediately clear whether the accident was heat related. 

“But we do know that the rail companies have been reporting that the extreme dry conditions have been affecting embankments and track conditions,” James MacCleary, a lawmaker representing Lewes, told Times Radio on Thursday. “We had a lot of speed restrictions in the area recently, which is directly related to the heat.” 

For trains, extreme heat poses three main problems: Most aren’t air-conditioned. That is changing, often as part of broader upgrades, but it is a slow and expensive process. London is spending an estimated £3.4 billion ($4.6 billion) to replace the carriages on another metro line, the Piccadilly, with a streamlined new fleet whose features include air-conditioning. And that is just one of the 11 lines in the city’s underground system, known as the Tube. 

Discomfort aside, overheated trains can lead to heat exhaustion and worse. Many carriage windows don’t open, and if a train should lose power, the situation could become dangerous under a scorching sun. 

  Heat can warp the tracks. Tracks are made of metal, which expands in heat. Many of Europe’s were built decades ago, designed for less extreme temperatures, and lately they have been buckling and twisting. 

  A “sun curve” — that is, a rail bending sideways in extreme heat — is believed to have caused a freight train derailment in Sweden in June, the Swedish Transport Administration said. Experts say a cheap adaptation to this problem is available by painting the tracks white, which creates a cooling effect by reflecting back sunlight.  But that stopgap fix is no substitute for an expensive, wholesale replacement of track, said Prof François Gemenne, the academic director of the master’s program in sustainability and social innovation at HEC Paris.

  Power lines are vulnerable, too. The overhead wires that supply power to electric trains can expand in extreme heat, just as tracks do. That can cause a power outage and, occasionally, a cascading series of problems along the rail network. Many of Europe’s roads weren’t built for today’s extreme temperatures, either. Roads made with concrete can crack if they don’t have room to expand in the heat. Such “blowups” forced the partial closure of German highways this summer.

  Road surfaces can melt, too, a phenomenon that has caused disruptions from Britain to Sweden.  As with railroad tracks, lighter colours can keep road surfaces cooler, Geoffron said. Roads can also be made with materials that are more heat resistant than traditional asphalt.