Deutsche Bahn halts all German trains overnight after GSM-R radio system failure
Anyone traveling in Germany faces lingering delays: Deutsche Bahn halted all trains nationwide last night when its GSM-R radio link between drivers and control centers failed. Service resumed near 1am on an emergency system. What to watch: the cause DB has not yet specified.
Anyone relying on German rail this morning is still dealing with the fallout from one of the most sweeping disruptions Deutsche Bahn has faced in recent memory. Late on Tuesday, the operator brought every train in the country to a stop. The trigger was a failure of GSM-R, the digital radio standard that connects train drivers with traffic control centers. Without that link, dispatchers cannot safely route trains, so the only option was to hold everything in place. Long-distance ICE services and regional lines including RE, RB and S-Bahn were affected alike, leaving passengers stranded at stations across the country. Deutsche Bahn said the problem was resolved shortly before 1am, roughly two and a half hours after the outage was first reported, and that service would return step by step using an emergency system to stabilize operations. CEO Evelyn Palla pointed to that backup setup as the reason trains could begin moving again. Even so, the company warned that schedules would stay thin for a while and said it would arrange taxi and hotel vouchers as well as replacement transport for stranded travelers. What remains open is the cause. Deutsche Bahn says it has been identified but has not made the details public. GSM-R has been the backbone of European railway communication since the early 2000s, so a nationwide failure of the system raises questions that reach well beyond a single night of cancellations. What to watch is whether the operator discloses what brought the network down and how it plans to stop a single point of failure from grounding the entire network again.