According to Deutsche Bahn, the large-scale failures in train traffic in northern Germany are due to sabotage. “Due to sabotage of cables, which are indispensable for train traffic, Deutsche Bahn had to stop train traffic in the north for almost three hours this morning,” said a spokeswoman for the German Press Agency in Berlin on Saturday. The responsible security authorities had started the investigation.
Countless travelers were previously stranded at the train stations because all long-distance traffic and some regional traffic were stopped in large parts of northern Germany. Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein were affected, as Deutsche Bahn wrote on Twitter.
The company recommended travelers traveling between Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia and between Berlin and Baden-Württemberg or Switzerland to use connections via Erfurt and Frankfurt/Main. Initially, the railway had spoken in general of a “technical fault on the route”, in a tweet there was talk of a “repair on the route”.
It was later said that the problems were due to a fault in the digital train radio GSM-R (Global System for Mobile Communications – Rail). “It is used for communication between the control centers that control train traffic and the trains and is therefore an indispensable component for smooth train traffic,” said a spokeswoman for Deutsche Bahn.
