BERLIN — A problem with a communications system forced Germany’s railway network to halt all trains late on Tuesday, leaving passengers stranded across the country.
All trains in Germany were “immobilized at stations” due to a breakdown in the railway radio communication systems, national rail operator Deutsche Bahn said.
Deutsche Bahn said shortly before 1 am local time — nearly three hours after it first reported the outage — that the problem had been resolved and service was resuming “step by step.”
Trains were held at stations and would-be travellers stood in long lines at information desks as they tried to figure out how to get to their destinations.
The company said there was a nationwide problem with the GSM-R digital communication system, which is used for internal communication on the railway network. It later said that the cause had been identified, but didn’t specify what it was.
German media outlet Bild reported quoting Deutsche Bahn CEO Evelyn Palla saying that they “were able to stabilize the situation with an emergency system.”
The railway operator said during the outage that it was giving taxi and hotel vouchers to passengers and, where possible, making available trains at stations for travellers to sit in, and apologised for the situation.
Passengers were left having to make emergency travel plans or arrange for contingencies, and many international passengers reported seeing “unhappy faces” upon their arrivals at busy hubs, like the capital’s central station.
In the north, trains were “completely at a standstill, because railway radio is down on a large scale,” the private regional rail company Metronom said.
“We think that nothing else will be running tonight,” Metronom spokesman Simon Martens told AFP.
Metronom operates regional lines around Hamburg, Bremen and Hanover, carrying more than 120,000 passengers a day.
The outage affected all trains — municipal, regional, and long-distance run by Deutsche Bahn, Berlin’s public transport authority said on X.
Traffic was completely suspended in North Rhine-Westphalia in the west, state police said.
In recent years, complaints about train delays and disruption in Germany have become increasingly frequent.
After decades of underinvestment which have led to trains often running late, Germany is trying to rapidly modernize its aging rail network with massive public investment.
The German railway system has on rare occasions in the past halted all or most trains, but usually because of storms rather than for technical reasons.
Source: Saudi Gazette