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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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].
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.]
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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 ..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
that could have been a lot cheaper of they would have spent in the past (their spending seems to have been very low)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.]
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.
Heh. Ukraine is doing better than that _during_ _the_ _war_: https://en.cfts.org.ua/news/ukrzaliznytsia_boasts_97_train_d...
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.
> 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.
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
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.
What is surprising is that GSM-R is 2g. Does not 2g have many security issues?
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.
These are effective targets for hybrid warfare for that very reason, plausible deniability
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 ..
You mean neglect?
Neglect is basically unscheduled maintenance.
Neglect is basically scheduled unmaintenance.
Thirty years of it.
and/or incompetence
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.
It's not, it was a scheduled software update.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is even a website just for that: https://www.db-gebrauchtzug.de/r/gbzp/gbzp/home?session=2228...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_gauge / Lichtraumprofil are different.
> 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.
There was a GSM-R outage in the UK last month ago too [0]
[0] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/nationwide-gsmr-outage-...
"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.
It's a GSM-R issue. See Tagesschau (German): https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/deutsche-bahn-...
I wish someone would do a deep-dive post mortem once everything is sorted out.
>This special mobile communication standard is designed to make communication fail-safe
Mmm, nope.
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.
If nothing works, eveything is safe, no?
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.
That is the point of failing safe. It would me much worse if some of the trains kept running...
For some reason, after reading the title of the article, I immediately thought the culprit was Emacs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33524683
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
Deutsche Bahn trains stop themselves all the time, no need to tell them
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
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...
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
Honestly can’t tell the difference between this and a regular day r/dbsucks
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.
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.
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...
Gee I wonder which country could be behind it
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.
They aren’t using starlink for safety critical comms
It's my understanding that most rail/rail collisions are the result of poor communication.
The railroads have their own mobile network, GSM-R, it's in the article...