Three hours of total paralysis. An act of “sabotage” targeting radio link cables caused a massive outage that completely cut off rail traffic in northern Germany on the morning of Saturday, October 8, Deutsche Bahn said.
All high-speed and regional connections in the north of the country have been interrupted. This sabotage targeted “cables essential for the movement of trains”said the German company, after the partial recovery of traffic.
It would be more precisely the GSM-R radio network of the trains, used for communication with the drivers, but also of“central interface between trains and infrastructure” control, affirms Der Spiegel, the first media to mention these suspicions of sabotage. These “fiber optic cables” could have been cut “in two places”, details the German magazine. According the daily Picturethe sabotage allegedly took place in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous region, in the west of the country.
Thousands of travelers stranded in stations
An action targeting this type of cable would not be within the reach of the first comer and would require “some knowledge” of the railway system, sources close to Deutsche Bahn point out to Picturespecifying that the federal police is in charge of the investigation.
The incident notably led to an interruption of connections between Berlin and certain regions in the west and north of the country, such as Schleswig-Holstein, the cities of Hamburg and Bremen, or even Lower Saxony and part of the Rhineland. -from North-Westphalia. The Berlin-Amsterdam connection has also been suspended.
Thousands of travelers thus remained stranded in stations on Saturday morning. Cancellations and delays were still to be expected during the day, despite the restoration of connections, warned the German railway company.
An aging rail network
The Deutsche Bahn company is regularly singled out for the many delays on its lines. It had thus announced, at the beginning of September, to have to carry out titanic work, with the replacement of 137,000 concrete sleepers, to upgrade its tracks.
The derailment of a train in the Bavarian Alps at the beginning of June, which had caused the death of five people and injured more than 40, had tragically illustrated the poor state of the German lines, linked to years of underinvestment. These failures fall all the more badly as the government encourages in recent months the Germans, great followers of the car, to take the train.
Experimented all summer in Germany, a monthly ticket at 9 euros allowing travel on the entire German network, excluding high-speed trains, has met with great success, with approximately 52 million tickets sold.