A problem with a communications system forced Germany’s railway network to halt all trains late on Tuesday, leaving passengers stranded across the country.
Trains were held at stations and would-be travellers stood in long lines at information desks as they tried to figure out how to get to their destinations.
The main national railway operator, Deutsche Bahn, said shortly before 1 am local time — nearly two-and-a-half hours after it first reported the outage — that the problem had been resolved and service was resuming “step by step.”
The company said there was a nationwide problem with the GSM-R digital communication system, which is used for internal communication on the railway network.
It later said that the cause had been identified, but didn't specify what it was.
German media outlet Bild reported quoting Deutsche Bahn CEO Evelyn Palla saying that they "were able to stabilise the situation with an emergency system.”
The railway operator said during the outage that it was giving taxi and hotel vouchers to passengers and, where possible, making available trains at stations for travellers to sit in, and apologised for the situation.
Passengers were left having to make emergency travel plans or arrange for contingencies, and many international passengers reported seeing “unhappy faces” upon their arrivals at busy hubs, like the capital’s central station.
“The train conductor was very nice, but he was just like, ‘we don’t know,’” said Reyna Ghoshal, a traveller from Atlanta, Georgia. She said that “we booked a bus for 8 a.m. just in case, but generally we don’t know what’s going on."
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 usually because of storms rather than for technical reasons.
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.
