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.

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

Probably someone forgot to renew the TLS certificate.

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.

It's russian hybrid warfare against Germany. Since invasion of Ukraine there have been numerous cable cuttings on train tracks, several train derailments, some fires.

It has become so bad that police helicopters are regularly patrolling train routes at night to spot sabotage as early as possible. People complain about the flight noise at night which was not there before.

So as a person working in cyber security, I'd put this into the sabotage bucket.

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.)

and/or incompetence

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.

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.

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.

Leide nicht.

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

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.

> 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-...

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

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