Trains halted for hours in northern Germany, sabotage seen

Train services were halted temporarily across a swath of northern Germany after a communication system failed, an outage that the national railway operator said was caused by sabotage

Germany Railway Standstill ((c) Copyright 2022, dpa (www.dpa.de). Alle Rechte vorbehalten)

Train services were halted temporarily across a swath of northern Germany on Saturday after a communication system failed, an outage that the national railway operator said was caused by sabotage.

Operator Deutsche Bahn said early Saturday that no long-distance or regional trains were running in the northwestern states of Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Bremen. That meant that trains between Berlin and Cologne, and between the capital and Amsterdam, also weren’t running, while trains from Denmark weren’t crossing the border into Germany.

After a nearly three-hour suspension, Deutsche Bahn said the problem — a “failure of the digital train radio system" — had been resolved but that some disruption could still be expected.

Deutsche Bahn said later Saturday that the disruption was caused by “sabotage of cables that are essential for railway traffic,” and that security authorities had opened an investigation, German news agency dpa reported.

There was no immediate word on who might have been responsible.