A communications system outage that plunged Germany’s rail network into disarray, leaving travellers stranded across the country, has been attributed to workers swapping out a component.
The federal government-owned network operator, Deutsche Bahn, issued an apology for the abrupt cessation of services, which began late on Tuesday and gradually resumed approximately two hours later, after midnight.
The sudden disruption led to long queues forming at information desks as frustrated passengers desperately sought alternative travel arrangements or accommodation for the night.
Deutsche Bahn said that it offered taxi and hotel vouchers, and where possible, allowed passengers to wait in stationary trains, many travellers complained of a lack of information.
Hotel rooms were also not available everywhere, forcing some individuals to endure journeys that stretched through the entire night.
The root cause of the widespread outage has now been identified as a problem with the GSM-R digital communication system, a critical component used for internal communication across the railway network.
By Wednesday morning, Deutsche Bahn said that trains were running “largely seamlessly”, though it cautioned that some residual delays might still be experienced.
The head of the operator's DB InfraGO infrastructure division, Philipp Nagl, said that the cause appeared to have been “the scheduled swap of a technical component”. He did not elaborate further.
“We are analysing with the highest priority how exactly this led to the fault,” Mr Nagl said in a brief statement, adding that the company apologizes to its customers for the disruption.
The breakdown came after years of increasingly frequent complaints about train delays and service interruptions.
Deutsche Bahn is conducting thorough though disruptive overhauls of major routes after years of underinvestment in a bid to improve its performance, but any significant improvement is expected to take time.
The European Union's most populous country has a railway network totaling some 33,400 kilometres (20,750 miles) in length, with 5,400 train stations and used by an average 50,000 trains per day. DB InfraGO says that makes it Europe's biggest network.
“That all rail traffic in Germany comes to a halt because of a technical defect is a new low in already poor operating quality,” Oliver Krischer, the regional transport minister in North Rhine-Westphalia state, Germany's most populous, told dpa.
He said there need to be “emergency mechanisms that prevent such a disaster in the future. People rely on reaching their destination at least somewhat punctually by rail”.
About two hours after the outage was reported, trains on at least part of the network were moving again.
The Berlin commuter network said trains were running, but delays and cancellations should still be expected. DB Regio Mitte, which runs regional trains in parts of western and southwestern Germany, said it had also resumed service but delays and cancellations should still be expected until at least 6am on Wednesday.
GSM-R, short for Global System for Mobile Communications–Railway, offers voice and data services needed to operate railways, including communication between train drivers and control centres.
According to the European Union Agency for Railways, it has been introduced across Europe since 2000 as a common standard for railway operations.
In recent years, complaints about train delays and disruption in Germany have become increasingly frequent.
Government-owned Deutsche Bahn has started conducting thorough but disruptive overhauls of major routes after years of underinvestment in a bid to improve its performance.
The German railway system has on rare occasions in the past halted all or most trains, but because of storms rather than for technical reasons.
