Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem | Hacker News Reader

Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem

apnews.com

186 pointssva_190 comments

If this weren’t Deutsche Bahn, I’d say it’s a cyber attack. Given that this is Deutsche Bahn, though, it may just as well be a maintenance issue.

You mean neglect?

Neglect is basically unscheduled maintenance.

Neglect is basically scheduled unmaintenance.

Thirty years of it.

Same thing happened in Poland and it was confirmed that Russians did it.

Do you have a link?

Was it similar to what we’re seeing now (nationwide, radio related)?

https://hackaday.com/2023/08/29/polish-railways-fall-victim-...

tl;dr: Trains can be stopped by a transmitting a simple, documented tone sequence over analog radio.

Ah, good, not the same thing then.

Honestly, DB are perfectly capable of clusterf*cking their GSM-R without help from Russia.

> it was confirmed that Russians did it.

>> It’s believed the perpetrators of the attack were supporters of the Russian war effort, as the stop signals were also joined by broadcasts of the Russian national anthem and a speech from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The attacks have some significance to the invasion of Ukraine, as Poland has been a hub for crucial weapons deliveries supporting the defence of Ukraine.

Yes, yes, it's a code of honour not to use the someone' else national anthem, sure. Especially if you need to bolster the population support for some ongoing cause.

Was waiting for someone to bring this up. X is already full of similar nonsense. As if DB didn't have a track record of utterly broken infrastructure. For decades.

I guess by this logic we could also claim that "there Germans caused the power outage in Berlin last winter" because the perpetrators were likely German political activists.

For DB, this type of outage is referred to as "Tuesday".

Probably someone forgot to renew the TLS certificate.

You may not be far off. Word is that it's a failed software update.

My 100 bucks are on an expired certificate in the trust chain. the same kind of issue that took down almost all Verifone payment terminals in Germany in 2022.

That's what happens when you ignore critical infrastructure for three decades.

Of course, if the government were to correct the mistakes of the past, it would get worse for another decade. The necessary repairs would cause a lot more delays, and voters would then say "Were giving them so much extra money, and it gets worse? Unacceptable!". So I fear we'll continue to have these problems forever.

> when you ignore critical infrastructure for three decades

To be fair, Deutsche Bahn is currently spending “€107bn between 2025 and 2029” on infrastructure upgrades [1].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/db75e347-b13b-4753-8130-6301bb55c...

They need to spend at least 3x that and they need to bring redundant workforce to fix Germany. It is completely broken now.

> They need to spend at least 3x that

According to whom?

Look at how much Switzerland spends per capita vs Germany. €477 vs €115. And Swiss kept their infrastructure well unlike Germans.

source: https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/themen/infrastruktur/inve...

> Look at how much Switzerland spends per capita vs Germany. €477 vs €115

Your chart shows close to €200 spent by Deutschland per capita in 2024, before the abovementioned spending splurge (about €30/person/year). (The numbers 477 and 115 never appear in your source.)

€230 in Berlin purchases about as much as €371 of CHF in Zürich [1]. So no, I’m not seeing evidence Germany needs to further 3x capital expenditure to unfuck its system, and that’s before observing it spends more than Italy per capita, and Italy’s intercity rail is fantastic.

[1] https://www.paritydeals.com/ppp-calculator/switzerland-vs-ge...

The number €115 is in the second chart as the per capita German expenditure on rail infrastructure in 2023. I don't see €477, but it's pretty close to the €480 figure for Switzerland in 2024. My guess is they saw an old version of the page when the first chart had numbers for 2023 and have kept using it without noticing the update.

And the Swiss CFF also thinks it is under spending on maintenance. Track maintenance last year was nearly 20% from its target.

Yeah sorry I was using the wrong page and outdated numbers from the infographic I have saved. Here is the picture my numbers came from: https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/1...

Here's an article (in German) from last year where Richard Lutz, boss at the time of Deutsche Bahn, says they needed at least twice as much as what they were getting:

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/mobilitaet/trotz-sond...

And here's an article (also in German) from this year about how the money that's been promised is not being delivered, leading to the cancelation of 90 projects.

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/es-fehlt-das-geld-mehr-a...

I also remember an article about how part of the train budget was being redistributed to fix highways, but I can't find it right now.

So I agree with the parent comment: the current investment is not enough and what little they have is constantly being diverted.

that could have been a lot cheaper of they would have spent in the past (their spending seems to have been very low)

Though I think they are not spending it sustainably. There is one train line and one lightrail line between my city and the next big city. They want to do things to the train line, blocking it for half a friggin year, and they make that announcement as if they do not give a damn about anyone, who relies on that line. Everyone will have to squeeze into the lightrail trains, which take longer. Often whole carriages are mephitic and unusable, when certain people have made them their temporary homes.

If things were done with an eye to the future, we would see things like extra lines, so that when things need to be renewed/maintained train service is not completely and utterly fucked for half a year for thousands of people, who want or need to take the train for daily commute. It is in my eyes utterly ridiculous, that we rely on a single track and are fucked, when literally anything at all needs to be done. Instant 100% train service disruption. This is Deutsche Bahn reliability.

Of course that would cost more ... It's cost accumulated by decades of neglect, and now they don't want to spend that money on the citizen, but rather pay biiiig juicy bonuses for management levels at Deutsche Bahn. Predatory capitalism at its best.

And that's not all. Their software and app sucks ass too.

NYC is spending around $68 billion to modernize their subway. Not sure what that’s says about Deutsche Bahn vs NYC/MTA but I’m sure both are not upgrading that much.

Not sure what I was expecting quality wise in Germany when I rode the DB rail between states and the Munich subway but it wasn’t much different than the US, except it much more expansive. Nothing fancy and it was late but I’d rather not pay for fancy here or there. Just make it work.

Out of which €106bn are to be spent on regulations and environmental assessments.

It's interesting how software systems and these large systems always have the same problem. Software failures are described by the engineers as being caused by "not enough maintenance and now the code needs to be refactored" and these real world systems are always caused by "not enough funding for preventative maintenance". It's a curious case that these issues are rarely caused by actions in the present but primarily by actions (and often other actors) in the past.

Presumably, we too shall be the villains to the people of 2050 as they shall, in turn, be the morons who built this stupid fucking system in this dumbass way instead of just designing it correctly and keeping it up to date over the years to the people of 2080. One thing I must consider doing is calling any fellow coworker an idiot pre-emptively since that way it's like I'm living 25 years in the future.

These are effective targets for hybrid warfare for that very reason, plausible deniability

For context, in case people are less familiar with German politics:

DB is in a misbegotten state of privatization, started in the 90ies. The government spun it out into a private company but still owns 100% of it. They were trying to pump it up so they could sell it for good money. They did that by skimping on everything including maintenance, to try and make the numbers look good.

Except they never got to whatever magic numbers they wanted before the maintenance debt came rearing its ugly head and now everything is royally screwed. And because it's a private company, there's a whole bunch of barriers limiting how much they can even subsidize the thing at this point.

Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story, but at the end of the day the only thing that will solve this is if they re-nationalize the tracks & infrastructure. What kind of an idiot thought including that in the privatization is a good idea is beyond me. It's not like you can build a 2nd railway network in order to get free market & competition. (For comparison, imagine privatizing the entire road network, village street to Autobahn.)

> Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story

“About 72 per cent of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled arrival time in the year to January 2025, compared with 78 per cent of British long-distance trains, according to the FT analysis.

Any interaction with the German rail network is also one of the biggest factors affecting the punctuality of long-distance rail travel in Central Europe” [1].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/d3b6e6b5-eddb-4230-b866-932d284ce...

The UK's railway network was only privately owned from 1994 to 2002 though, everything after that is already under the umbrella of re-nationalisation, which didn't go super well either (my knowledge about that is rather vague). Not sure how useful 2025 numbers are in this context.

[ed.: to be clear - AFAIK they are in the same state currently, private company but 100% government owned. But there's a huge distinction in that the UK has made the decision to move back in the direction of nationalisation. In Germany, some people still pretend this is somehow fine and just needs to get cleaned up before the privatization can continue.]

Heh. Ukraine is doing better than that _during_ _the_ _war_: https://en.cfts.org.ua/news/ukrzaliznytsia_boasts_97_train_d...

Germany also was very punctual with their trains during the war.

The secret, as told in some other threads (elsewhere), is that "If the service is canceled, it can't have been late!" So trains that are over ~30 minutes late can be canceled.

The one good thing is that they failed to take it private. Imagine how bad it would be with the current maintenance backlog and no public funding.

The New Zealand government sold their rail system, then Toll didn't make a success of it, so the government bought it back at a massive loss.

Now rail is just a nightmare moneypit. But older voters love rail "it's efficient" so the government panders to them and wastes more expenditure on it.

Edit: Currently for every $1.50 tax income from road user taxes and petroleum taxes: $1 is spent on roads, and 50 cents is spent on "rail". Crap. Rail is paid for by cars but is mostly waste.

I don’t know much about New Zealand but I do know that a functioning rail network is amazing(I live in Switzerland and frequently travel by public transport).

My native Sweden had an amazing rail network as well, we even made our own locomotives, but unfortunately it has also been neglected, though not as bad as in Germany.

Don’t diss rail, it can be great.

Rail can also be awful.

New Zealand is largely coastal so ships mostly beat rail. The 3 largest cities have their own ports. Cook Straight separates the South Island from the North Island, which complicates rail down South (apart from the Kaikoura Earthquake totally stuffing it). We don't do many bulk goods (unlike Australia which loves mining).

NZ overall has much less dense population - e.g. Auckland has insanely more urban sprawl than Zurich.

Sweeping statements about rail are a problem here (especially if incorrectly comparing against other populous or landlocked countries), and the biased love of rail makes for wasteful expenditure.

> Auckland has insanely more urban sprawl than Zurich.

Auckland: ca. 1000 people/km² in 30km radius

Zürich: ca. 800 people/km² in 30km radius

People severely underestimate how sprawly Zürich is.

I don't know how many travelers use train instead of a car in New Zealand, but if it means 20% less traffic on the road, those taxes are probably worthy. That's what I say to all drivers which get nervous for sitting behind me when I bike to work. Think, that if I can't bike, there will be another car on the street.

You're mixing urban and national rail. The national rail system is freight focused (and some token tourist services).

Our politicians are involved with a very large money pit for a ferry between the islands: railcars being a VERY expensive requirement (I think because terminals for rail require much more engineering). It's a mess.

Railways are a difficult infrastructure, only one notch less difficult than airplanes. Even in terms of population, New Zealand would need at least 10 million population for dense railway network to make sense. Then car speed limit in NZ of mere 100kmh is very low, trains could easily move people faster than a car.

Rail journeys in the UK doubled after privatisation. The service was dire under public ownership because it never got enough investment.

Some correlation but not necessarily causation.

Passenger numbers start rising before privatisation, and that was attributed to an uptick in the economy (after a period of recession).

Passenger numbers also roughly doubled in Germany 1994 to now even though there was only a weak privatisation (state-owned private company).

> Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story, but at the end of the day the only thing that will solve this is if they re-nationalize the tracks & infrastructure. What kind of an idiot thought including that in the privatization is a good idea is beyond me. It's not like you can build a 2nd railway network in order to get free market & competition. (For comparison, imagine privatizing the entire road network, village street to Autobahn.)

If you privatize the infrastructure and trains together you can at least compare one region against another, even if they're not directly competing. Trying to operate the trains separately from the tracks was a disaster in the UK and lead pretty directly to two mass casualty incidents.

Governments can be just as bad at infrastructure investments.

That being said, I get the sense it's a German cultural problem. I used to travel to Germany quite frequently and was always surprised at the poor quality of much of the infrastructure, including private. The cell phone networks and internet speeds were all awful. As recently as 6 years ago my phone dropped to edge as soon as I left the city and within the major cities I had terrible performance. I'm not kidding when I say that I often had near dialup speeds, despite having full LTE bars. Maybe this has improved since.

As for rail, for Europe, the rail lines should probably be run as a cooperative with the rail companies paying dues.

It's not a purely cultural problem but mostly a political problem.

Germany sold out (a lot of it under the table and really fast without proper oversight) all of the good working stuff in the 90s to investors and the state kept all the bad stuff so there's no money or will to invest. All of your examples were state owned and operating nicely in the 80s. And then the CDU basically froze all progress for years under the umbrella of saving costs (instead of taxing the rich and companies and opening a lot of loopholes to transfer assets out of the country)

So all of the infrastructure in all aspects is on its last legs and somehow now you can't build stuff anymore anywhere apparently because everything takes forever in the western world especially in Germany where maddening Bureaucracy is apparently a good thing.

Well, the EU insists that track & train operations are separate. (ironically the UK _is_ combining passenger operations and track somewhat back together, which is only possible because of brexit).

The bigger issue tbh is the enormous cost inflation in civil engineering in general. This seems to be a problem everywhere. There's no doubt some of this is caused by material cost increases, labour shortages etc, but I'd say the huge amounts of regulation added over the years is really a core driver of this.

No. They cut on maintenance to make line go up. And then they deconstructed existing switches, signal boxes, train lines, and train stations to cut costs even more. This is not an EU problem or a regulations problem or labour cost problem. These are the fruits of privatisation and capitalism.

What is the incentive for politicians to sell a publicly owned company for a lot of money? How would they personally benefit from a high price? I can only think of incentives to sell it for as little as possible to a most favored investor/buddy.

Exit strategy for after their political career. Compare with Gerhard Schröder

I was once on a job interview there, in the Train/Station Wifi branch, mostly web programming related though IIRC. It wasn't so much of a quiz format but the interviewers wanted to know what I worked on before, why I wanted to change etc. What really stuck with me was how the department CTO insisted how superior and privacy conforming their logging system is. Not saving anything, not even for a micro second. I didn't dare to ask how they debugged anything. But in the end I was rejected and the reason was: more questions than answers.

It's negative selection applied to you. And you have dodged a bullet here.

and/or incompetence

Could also be a russian firembomber gig worker getting brushed under mnt carpet of societal stability. Anything to keep this powderkeg of parallel societies going ..

What is surprising is that GSM-R is 2g. Does not 2g have many security issues?

Given the current heat wave, it might be a case of "trains not running because it's too hot"? As opposed to, you know, "trains not running because it's too cold", e.g. because of icing on the overhead lines.

Don’t forget trains not running due to leaves on the track.

Or the "wrong kind of snow": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wrong_type_of_snow

Well, it was a *planned* update of a central system component in their radio. That's why the restauration took only 8 hours. Their 90 min excuse is bonkers. Unplanned it would have taken much longer. Can confirm that their update planning process is abyssal. Half a year for the first simple reply. Comparable only to HP

Someone needs to restart some Windows NT 4.0 machine in some cabinet somewhere

There was also a very peculiar train crash in the UK just a few days ago. A train hit a stationary train. That shouldn't really happen in this day and age. Sabotage was the first thing that came to my mind.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gy60gg6k5o

Maybe. OP isn't saying it's necessarily malicious interference though.

Not a stretch to imagine that it is though. Germany has some very effective radical vandals who make statements by interrupting infrastructure.

could still be incompetence, one newspaper says an update has gone wrong

The UK buys most of their trains from Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) and just brands them differently.

British person living in Berlin.

Incorrect. They wouldn't fit in the tiny UK loading gauge (profile). UK trains are indeed variants of continental models, but made to custom size, and many (most?) of them in the UK.

Leide nicht.

Trains in Germany and the UK for main-line running both use 1435mm gauge. UK trains are not a custom size.

They are. Rail gauge and loading gauge are different concepts. Use Wikipedia.

Everything about UK rail is custom (apart from the gauge). Apparently it's one of the (many) reasons HS2 is such a mess.

They were trying to run trains faster than typical continental high speed lines, which meant custom design work that needs loads of additional testing and certification. Rather than just use the Spanish or French high speed designs.

Max line speed of HS2 is 360km/h, with provision for 400 in some sections in future. This is entirely in line with many other modern HS lines. China’s been running regular 360km/h services for years.

This is a project with a 200+ year shelf life. Designing to 300 or less would have been short sighted, and many of the changes to accommodate such high speeds actually reduce costs in the long term (slab track, headroom to catch up delayed services, ability for one trainset to operate more services per day etc).

The cost overruns of HS2 are primarily from plain old poor project management, complex planning law and constant political meddling, not engineering decisions.

China has run at 360kmh before, but last I checked they mostly run slower.

Air resistance is a killer as you go faster. So for trains 300 is usually about the best compromise between energy use and speed. If you want to go faster a jet at altitude is going to be much faster at a better fuel efficiency. High speeds make sense for long distances.

This is a project designed to last for centuries. We’re not even fossil free yet and already seeing days of negative electricity cost thanks to renewables. In 50 years the extra energy cost is going to be a rounding error. Locking ourselves into 300km/h forever to save a relatively small sum is unfathomably short sighted.

One of the drivers of cost has been the high speed part. It meant the route needed to be straight which meant more tunnelling to avoid certain areas. Lower speed track would have allowed them to route around problem areas.

High speed rail does not need to be straight! You can get away with 6km radii at 360km/h on dedicated passenger lines. The high power output of the EMUs they’ve selected and all new OHLE power supplies mean that trains can accelerate and decelerate much more aggressively than on legacy mixed use lines like the WCML, allowing smaller radii in practice with short slower sections. It’s a myth that HS2 is expensive because it had to be straight.

The vast majority of the tunnelling for HS2 has been either to get in and out of dense urban areas without too much demolition, or to reduce the political cost of driving a building site through Tory heartlands (Chilterns AONB).

> Max line speed of HS2 is 360km/h, with provision for 400 in some sections in future.

That's already been reduced to 320 km/h under this year's "HS2 reset". Which I imagine in reality will be 300 km/h normally at most, with even lower speeds seen day to day

Interestingly the written report to the government stated "However, no railway in the UK, or globally, is currently engineered for 360 kph". Are you incorrect or did they forget to include China in their research?

Anyway, I thought these were last decade's talking points? I thought it was all about capacity now, not speed? Except I thought there were also rumblings about reducing capacity from the previous announcements? Hard to keep up...!

The messaging, in general, has been abysmal. But capacity and speed are not separate concerns. Consistently high average speeds increase capacity - I wish this had been actually communicated.

> The messaging, in general, has been abysmal

Indeed, which has eroded trust. That along with huge cost revisions, you can see why some people are incredibly pessimistic about the entire project

It was all planned lies: high speed rail is sexy. It sold the project.

> Consistently high average speeds increase capacity - I wish this had been actually communicated.

Show us the numbers then ;) And the cost benefit of higher speed vs longer stations and trains

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_gauge / Lichtraumprofil are different.

Deutsche Bahn doesn't manufacture rolling stock. They buy it from Siemens, Stadler, Talgo, Alstom etc...

Edit: AFAIK, some of it - mainly high-speed trains - is designed according to DB specs and subsequently offered under a new name (and with changes) to other train companies. For example DB ICE 3 (manufactured by Siemens) / Siemens Velaro.

You can probably buy some of the older rolling stock from DB thought.

There is even a website just for that: https://www.db-gebrauchtzug.de/r/gbzp/gbzp/home?session=2228...

It does happen occasionally, but DB tends to run, maintain and sometimes upgrade its successful (~reliable and widely introduced) rolling stock until it falls apart or is grossly outdated (40+ years old). Rail passenger numbers are increasing, so there is no need to sell stuff to downsize.

The Flixtrain company uses 40+ years old IC (intercity) cars - they have no air conditioning and it's really loud inside with open windows, especially so in tunnels. That is the kind of stuff that DB sells.

Hrrm. Funny. I thought that those were so called "Eurofima", which I remember as fucking cold in summer, because then their AC were set at full blast, which was annoying at the times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurofima_coach

Also no real opening of windows anymore, because early onset of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druckertüchtigte_Schienenfahrz... <- meaning pressure protection against passing trains at high speeds, entering tunnels, and such.

They did look like Eurofima cars in the article, but my memory of that train ride is pretty clear - it was just a few months ago. I guess most likely the European Eurofima fleet is in very different states of upgrade from the 70s original. I have never been on an Eurofima car with air conditioning, let alone air conditioning turned up to 11. As far as I can tell, none of them have air conditioning in Germany.

Maybe they upgraded them without the AC, or they are based on slightly different wagons.

Anyway, in the 80ies they had AC. In Germany, als die Bahn noch kam, regular IC, no matter if 4-, or 6-seat cabin(depending on class), or Großraumwagen. I remember because sometimes I've been naughty and dialed it down a little, after opening the panel at the end of the wagon with a multitool. Non-destructive, OFC :-)

Like this, but without screen, and more buttons.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/13-04-29...

I liked to sit on the window, and there was a metallic grille on the underside of the window. With small slits, maybe 2 to 3 cm long, 3mm wide, a few 100 at all? And that blasted right into your face, or your side if you sat upright, or leaned back. Not noisy, just cold.

Different, probably later design, and apparently adjustable.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/13-04-29...

In the Nahverkehrswagen (Silberlinge) it was different. They had no AC, just heating. Which you could turn down or fully off with an open lever. Nobody ever did that. Except me :-) At least their windows could be opened by pushing the upper half down.

https://www.360cities.net/image/abnrz-silberling-nahverkehr-...

> The UK buys most of their trains from Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) and just brands them differently.

This is totally incorrect.

We buy our trains from French/Swiss/German/Spanish/Belgian manufacturers, or build them ourselves in eg Derby.

We do not buy our trains from DB.

Yes, and just yesterday a passenger train was routed into the path of a freight train due to some points failure. It does make you wonder. https://www.railmagazine.com/news/points-failure-results-in-...

The trains heading for each other was not a direct result of the points failure but a direct result of the manual operation of the points after the failure. Everything was on go-slow so no risk of collision. This was human error.

There was a GSM-R outage in the UK last month ago too [0]

[0] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/nationwide-gsmr-outage-...

No, sabotage doesn't hold up. The thing that rules it out is the braking, or rather lack of it. Passengers reported no screeching and no sudden deceleration before impact, which means the driver thought the line ahead was clear. Tampered track or an obstruction or some kind of remote hack (getting into the realms of fantasy there) would normally give him something to react to. This entirely fits a missed signal or a signalling/protection failure.

It also feels like "a train hitting a stationary one shouldn't happen", but that's the textbook rear-end-after-a-SPAD scenario - e.g. Ladbroke Grove. No official has hinted at foul play either. Everything so far points to an accident in the signalling chain or faulty TPWS. But the interim report is due in two days so we'll see more then.

> This entirely fits a missed signal or a signalling/protection failure

Perhaps a signalling/protection sabotage?

> No official has hinted at foul play either

That doesn't really mean much. Officials in the UK are incredibly reserved in hinting at something that they can't back up with evidence. Since they're still investigating, they keep their mouth shut. But yes, the sensible thing is to wait for the report.

Why stop there? Maybe it's sabotage all the way down, like turtles?

I'm sure that even if the official report totally excludes the possibility of sabotage, for some people that in itself will be the clearest possible sign that there was, in fact, sabotage at play.

"IT Outage: No train service nationwide. Due to a nationwide outage of the GSMR digital rail radio system, all trains are being held at stations. We are working around the clock to resolve the issue.

Our technicians are working around the clock to resolve the outage.

Please continue to check your travel connection immediately before departure using the travel information service at bahn.de, the DB Navigator app, or by calling the travel information hotline at 030/2970."

https://www.bahn.de/service/fahrplaene/aktuell

Word on the german bahn reddit seems to be that a buggy software update is the cause. Remains to be seen if this is the real cause

AI vibes all the place!

Everything I've ever heard about railway and train software suggests AI cannot possibly make things any worse than they already are. Conservatism causes no changes to be possible, which means many changes have to be made via workarounds and virtualization wrappers which cause a giant mess over time which create breakage which creates a conservative culture/laws.

A planned major update to align with other countries platforms, which other countries did estimate to need 9 years for. So they did have plenty of time to test that update, as well as preparing a fast fallback, in case of not-working.

It's a GSM-R issue. See Tagesschau (German): https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/deutsche-bahn-...

>This special mobile communication standard is designed to make communication fail-safe

Mmm, nope.

If nothing works, eveything is safe, no?

That is the point of failing safe. It would me much worse if some of the trains kept running...

It's not if nothing works, it's what works when nothing works, i.e. the safe thing must always work. period. (i'm not trying to be pedantic or an ass)

Safe in this kind of context means no property damage or no casualties or no injuries. Not no financial damage. Sometimes repairable property damage is accepted if that is active or passive safety component.

It did fail safe though?

Interference led to the network stopping, not trains just racing towards each other due to bogus line authorities. That is, by definition, fail-safe

That seems like a fail-safe interpretation of communication: if there is no communication, stop the train. But that's a special case. GSM-R is much more than line authorities.

>GSM-R is a secure platform for voice and data communication between railway operational staff, including drivers, dispatchers, shunting team members, train engineers, and station controllers.

Designing the communication network itself in such a way that the entire thing can apparently fail, doesn't sound "fail-safe" to me. (Though its failure may trigger fail-safes in higher-level systems.) In particular, some functions may require communications to be "safe"; e.g., emergency personnel not being able to communicate is not "safe".

But perhaps this is being overstated in the vague reporting, and it's only a regional failure.

"Fail-safe" by definition means that the system fails into a safe state. Stopping the trains on comms failure _is_ safe.

Agreed. What happened to everything else on comms failure?

I wish someone would do a deep-dive post mortem once everything is sorted out.

The fallback for GSM-R is the normal GSM network, but according to informed guesses I've read, the handsets still need to authenticate using their GSM-R credentials (it's just normal GSM roaming), and that's failing too.

Very interesting, I always thought it was completely separate infrastructure by design. I wonder what they'll do once commercial GSM networks throughout Europe are shut down?

Upgrade to 4G or 5G.

In the long term, sure, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRMCS is some way away, and I doubt they'll upgrade cab radios to 5G for the fallback path alone.

I have no idea which is cheaper, upgrading those or paying for one 2G network to remain on (at least enough cell towers to cover the railway network).

GSM-R is mainly implemented with dedicated BTSes aligned with rail line

We were talking about the fallback system, see earlier in the thread.

It doesn’t surprise me at all. Deutsche Bahn got so bad in the recent years that Switzerland started turning some German trains around at Basel (border) to protect its own timetable from DB delays.

Trains are being started up again (staggered because the current draw of so many accelerating trains could cause problems) since about 10 minutes past midnight, 30 minutes ago.

Any HNer blocked in a DB train who can share with us the experience?

The same as usual I suppose: stopped at a station in a tiny village, without any information. Train staff will provide water, but that's about it.

That sucks, sorry for this

Don't be sorry for me, I was only relaying earlier experiences.

Actually, I read stories that on some of the long distance trains with restauration they gave away all food and non-alcoholic drinks for free.

I’m sitting in an ICE in Munich that was supposed to leave a few minutes before I saw this story on HN. First the conductor announced a 30 minute delay because the radio wasn’t working, and then they bumped it to 2 hours. They didn’t say it was a systemwide problem.

I would get out and look for a hotel before all of them get sold out. Probably tomorrow too.

Luckily: Update from announcer is that trains can start again at 12:25 AM and they reduced our delay by 30 minutes. But there’s still a huge line of riders at the DB service desk.

Had a very similar experience in Munich years ago. That time it was because a train engine on fire on the tracks leading out of the station...

In Erfurt since 2,5 hours. Out of office train driver keeps us updated from chats with fellow drivers (their sources say it is due to software update), radio is fixed now and trains processed one after another (starting with super fast ones - Munich > Berlin, e.g. - so the tracks get emptied quickly). Other interesting observations: when our train stopped, all hotels were already fully booked, as were coach tickets (Flixbus) that would run in the early morning. Crazy how fast people react to shocks.

Yeah, I experienced that a few times in airports with massive disturbance. You could see all the hotels getting fully booked almost live, then when you eventually arrive somewhere with a booking you still have to wait an hour due to how long the queue at the hotel reception is. Always a crazy experience

Society is really living on a thin ice of equilibrium.

I am a daily user of S-Bahn. I know 2 alternative routes from every single station from home to work. I even started to memorize their departure times. DB prepares you for the worst.

I was at a conference in Frankfurt, traveling back to Amsterdam with my cofounder and got stuck in Oberhausen. We have an early flight tomorrow and there's no trains in NL due to a strike tomorrow morning, so we decided to take an uber home.

At first the delay was 30 minutes. Then 2 hours. After 1h30 with zero updates we decided to bail. Just checked and nothing is moving yet, so we made the right call.

Yeah, definitely. Hope you can get to your plane on time and that you can expense the uber trip, that’s a pretty long ride from what I see on gmap

So a 2h ride? Was it easy to find a driver?

Yes and yes. Uber for 260 eur arrived within 5 minutes after booking.

We departed around 30-45 min late from Basel sbb (in Switzerland) in a night train that goes through Germany.

They told us about the communication issues but what surprised me is that they told us that the Deutsch bahn replaced the locomotive with one of their (that was near the border I guess) so we could depart.

For some reason, after reading the title of the article, I immediately thought the culprit was Emacs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33524683

Was left stranded in Berlin last night trying to get home to a neighboring city, which should have taken 45 minutes (more like 1h20 nowadays due to time tables and whole regional train lines being down for maintenance til EOY).

The lack of communication was probably the worst of all. Announcements saying to take alternative means of transport. The DB Navigator app insists that everything is still running and it was impossible to get clear info as to whether RE trains were also affected.

Eventually we took a Miles car home and because of this and past unreliability I'm, sadly, thinking about getting a car instead.

AP source: https://apnews.com/article/germany-trains-halted-communicati...

@dang please update if you see this

And merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651613

Happened before at a smaller scale, crazy high redundancies in GSM-R mean this is likely sabotage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R

I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be incompetence at this point.

vibe coding the rail software.

If you know anything at all about the Deutsche Bahn, you'll know that it's most likely self-sabotage, in other words, incompetence.

Current suspicion on the German rails reddit is a software update gone wrong.

My personal suspicion, GSM-R is 90s GSM, they'll likely have a fried HLR & VLR because in any GSM network these are fundamental, without them you can't even get roaming from public phone networks working as there is no way for the public network to authenticate GSM-R subscribers.

Same problem happened two years ago. You'd think that would be enough time to figure out a failsafe routine

Seems like the failsafe also failed today.

I think you will find it *did* fail to safe.

(To suggest otherwise implies you do not understand what failsafe means!).

Granted, i guess backup is what i meant

Interesting, I just took an OBB train today from Zurich to Amsterdam, which passes through a lot of Germany.

Its return train is currently stuck at Oberhausen.

A truly chaotic week in Europe, alongside the UK train crash and the unprecedented heat wave.

It could be chaos on Dutch rail too the coming day. Trimmed down schedule on some of the busiest routes (due to the current heatwave). Add to that a labor union strike on Wednesday June 24 (that's today local time as I write this).

Although NL rail travelers are usually quite good at anticipating, and adjust their schedule. So might just be a quieter-than-usual day.

It helps that 90% of the population can cycle to work if they have to. Remote work is also very big.

Downdetector shows parallel disruption spikes, similar pattern as end of last year, not as widespread yet. https://downdetector.com

The jet lag team must be in Germany again. Sam, you being deuschbahnned?

Downdetector shows parallel disruption spikes, similar pattern as end of last year, not as widespread yet.

https://downdetector.com

Mainly Meta Services, which seem to spike, isn't it? And Google Fiber

A bit more, traderepublic, tiktok, snapchat, X, AWS, CloudFlare

https://xn--allestrungen-9ib.de/en/

These could be based on different scales of numbers since it is midnight in Germany

Ah, now it's more obvious.. True! Thank you

And a football world cup game just ended.

I wonder how they managed to tell trains to stop.

Signalling still works, so you can let the trains continue to a safe place like a station and then not let them leave until the radio issue is resolved

That depends, cab signaling for example needs radio to work

Not necessarily, at least for some time:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienförmige_Zugbeeinflussung

Deutsche Bahn trains stop themselves all the time, no need to tell them

Stop signals. For legacy train control systems, these still work visually and via wires. ETCS (starting with Level 2) does use GSM-R, but everything is fail-safe: No active communication, no movement authority, so the "virtual signal" display in the cab will pretty quickly also show "stop".

Can passengers tell, I thought German trains were always disrupted!

It is telling that I thought “that’s why all trains were late this afternoon” before I realized that the issue occurred only minutes ago.

Anyone else watch Season 2 of Hijack?

Is that news? Sounds like status quo.

Is it just me or is the webpage broken with a redirect loop between:

* https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/german-train-service-suspende...

* https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/german-rail-service-suspended...

Honestly can’t tell the difference between this and a regular day r/dbsucks

how did germany become this ? i think from my observations, in china, when talk about Germany, the #1 thing is the fucking stupid train system....

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651552

and submitted by the same user sva_

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sva_

The other article is only one sentence long. I guess the OP posted it and later found this that is a better source. (Un)luckily both reached the front page. Usually dang/tomhow will make a cleanup soon to avoid duplication and keep the discussion in a single thread.

Gee I wonder which country could be behind it

It's the heat.

Some system somewhere in need of cooling.

Does not get it, because BAHN.

Crapping out.

Cascades of disbelief.

R2D2-like cybernetic seizures.

Endless commuter pleasures.

No mischief at all.

Just bad techno-thrall...

Unexpected summer.

A real bummer.

It's either that or starlink, some railroads in Germany go through areas without any mobile network signal. Think about how crazy that is in 2026 when everything expects everyone to be online 24/7/365.

It's my understanding that most rail/rail collisions are the result of poor communication.

They aren’t using starlink for safety critical comms

The railroads have their own mobile network, GSM-R, it's in the article...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com