Record petrol prices appear to have spurred hundreds of thousands of Germans to ditch their cars for the train, a trend that has buoyed state railway Deutsche Bahn ahead of this autumn’s flotation of its train operations.

Hartmut Mehdorn, chief executive of the Bahn and newly carved-out subsidiary Deutsche Bahn Mobility and Logistics, said the group carried 941m passengers in the first half of the year, 30m more than in the same period last year.