station were reconfigured so that the Magdeburg–Leipzig railway and the Trebnitz–Leipzig railway, which previously had separate tracks between Leipzig Hauptbahnhof and Leipzig Messe now share the left-hand pair of tracks and the new, right-hand pair of tracks were connected to the new line towards the airport. The infrastructure track numbers in this section were changed. Work on Gröbers junction was still under way in early 2003. The line was connected to Gröbers junction on 16 April 2003 and the overhead wires on the whole section became live on 24 April 2003. Operations commenced on the section between Gröbers and Leipzig/Halle Airport station on 30 June 2003. From this time, all long-distance trains between Leipzig and Halle ran over the newly built section and Regional-Express services on route RE 5 ran hourly. The introduction of additional services between Leipzig Hauptbahnhof and the airport was repeatedly deferred to cut costs. A total of more than 70 long-distance and regional trains ran daily on the line in 2003. On 13 October 2003, trial runs of ICE S sets began with speeds of up to . These runs were operated on behalf of the manufacturer to gain approval for the train sets to run under the overhead line at high speeds. With the opening of the City Tunnel, trains which previously ran as RE 5, were now rebranded as lines S5 and S5X of the Mitteldeutschland S-Bahn bound for Zwickau. Erfurt – Gröbers und Planena – Halle-Ammendorf section On 25 August 2014, the overhead contact line on the remaining new line was permanently energised. From 1 to 19 September 2014, high-sped trials were carried out with ICE S sets. As part of these runs, a train reached a speed of on the section from Erfurt to Gröbers for the first time on 5 September 2014. Testing and acceptance of ETCS began in late 2014, which was followed to test runs in early 2015. From May to October 2015, the three-tier safety regime of the ETCS systems was tested. Between March and October 2015, this was followed by around 900 test runs to measure the track geometry to check the overhead contact wire system with the later trains running on the route using ETCS technology. A trial was operated between Erfurt, Leipzig and Halle (Saale) on 4 September 2015. As part of the opening ceremony on 9 December 2015, two special trains ran on the