Small Austria town near border with Germany at peak of its capacity of receiving asylum seekers

After the German government halted the train from Austria to Germany, the city of Salzburg is already at the peak of the capacity of receiving asylum seekers, Salzburg Mayor told Xinhua in late night on Sunday.

"We are now at the peak of our capacity,...... we don't know what will happen tomorrow," Heinz Schaden ,the mayor of the city told Xinhua at a train station in Salzburg.

As a small town of Austria near the border with Germany, Salzburg is the last station for many asylum seekers to Germany in Austria. Many of them have to wait here for the reopen of the railway.

The Austrian Federal Railways (OeBB) has temporarily suspended train services to Germany at the request of Germany's rail service, the OeBB announced Sunday.

The halt in rail traffic is to last for 12 hours, and expected to be lifted at 6:00 a.m. local time on Monday morning. Local media reported by 18:00 p.m. no more trains had passed from Salzburg, Austria, across the immediate border into Germany.

"The railway is the most important," said the mayor, saying because those people come and leave Salzburg mostly by train.

Schaden said he definitely feels a lot of pressure as the situation is completely new for everybody.

In the last two weeks, his city received thousands of asylum seekers each day, "we never have witnessed anything like this before," he told Xinhua.

At 19:00 p.m. Sunday evening a train with 500 asylum seekers arrived in Salzburg from Vienna, with a further 1,500 reportedly on trains on the way. It is currently assumed they will be divided up into various living quarters overnight.

Austria and Germany are set to hold a crisis meeting over the asylum seeker issue in Berlin on Tuesday.
  Xinhua - globaltimes.cn
14/9/15