Technical glitch paralyses Germany’s rail network

BERLIN: All trains in Germany were “immobilised at stations” on Tuesday evening due to a breakdown in the railway radio communication systems, national state-run rail operator Deutsche Bahn said.

After decades of underinvestment which have led to trains often running late, Germany is trying to rapidly modernise its ageing rail network with massive public investment.

“Our technicians are working flat out to resolve this disruption,” Deutsche Bahn said on its website, without specifying how long it would last.

“We are trying to bring the trains into the stations so that passengers can get off. And then we will have to solve the problem,” Evelyn Palla, Deutsche Bahn chief told the Bild newspaper.

In the north, trains are “completely at a standstill, because railway radio is down on a large scale,” the private regional rail company Metropol 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 company told customers “not to undertake any more train journeys today” and look for alternative means of transport.

The outage affects all trains – municipal, regional, and long-distance run by Deutsche Bahn, Berlin’s public transport authority said on X.

Traffic is completely suspended in North Rhine-Westphalia in the west, state police said.