Rail traffic was completely interrupted for about three hours in northern Germany on Saturday due to a “fault in the train’s digital radio system”, before being restored in the late morning, the Deutsche Bahn company announced.
“The train radio glitch in northern Germany has been fixed. Traffic is currently being restored in the affected areas,” the company announced on Twitter late in the morning.
An act of “sabotage” caused this failure, said the company Deutsche Bahn.
A “sabotage of cables” is at the origin of this failure that caused the suspension for three hours on Saturday morning of rail links throughout northern Germany, a spokesman for the company told AFP.
The interruption refers in particular to high-speed lines, as well as regional connections, specifies Deutsche Bahn.
It also caused a break in connections between Berlin and certain regions in the west and north of the country such as Schleswig-Holstein, the city of Hamburg or even North Rhine-Westphalia.
The Berlin-Amsterdam link has also been suspended, specifies Deutsche Bahn.
poor line condition
The company, regularly singled out for numerous delays on its lines, announced in early September that it had to carry out titanic work, including the replacement of 137,000 concrete sleepers, to improve its tracks.
A train derailment in the Bavarian Alps in early June, killing five people and injuring more than 40, provided a tragic illustration of the poor state of German lines, linked to years of underinvestment.
These failures go down all the more badly as the government has in recent months encouraged Germans, big car fans, to take the train.
Tested throughout the summer in Germany, a €9 monthly ticket that allows travel on the entire German network (excluding high-speed trains) has been a huge success, with approximately 52 million tickets sold.
This subscription, financed by the State and which saved 1.8 million tons of CO2 emissions according to official data, could be replaced by a somewhat more expensive ticket.
Source: BFM TV
