Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- @dang please update if you see this
And merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651613
by sva_ - 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.
by Kirth - For some reason, after reading the title of the article, I immediately thought the culprit was Emacs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33524683by e-v
- Any HNer blocked in a DB train who can share with us the experience?by dgellow
- 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.
by icefo - 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.by gpvos
- 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.
by jtwaleson - 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.by mcbetz
- 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.
- 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.by gpvos
- 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.by mfiro
- 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.by gpvos
- 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?by lxgr
- It's a GSM-R issue. See Tagesschau (German): https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/deutsche-bahn-...by d2kx
- >This special mobile communication standard is designed to make communication fail-safe
Mmm, nope.
by wrs - I wish someone would do a deep-dive post mortem once everything is sorted out.by RetroTechie
- 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 causeby ripbozo
- AI vibes all the place!by segmondy
- 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.by rurban
- "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."
by modinfo - 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.
- Maybe. OP isn't saying it's necessarily malicious interference though.by OJFord
- There was a GSM-R outage in the UK last month ago too [0]
[0] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/nationwide-gsmr-outage-...
by gib444 - 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.
by ablation - 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-...by beejiu
- 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.by mmoll
- These are effective targets for hybrid warfare for that very reason, plausible deniabilityby polyomino
- Same thing happened in Poland and it was confirmed that Russians did it.by ed_balls
- What is surprising is that GSM-R is 2g. Does not 2g have many security issues?by uxhacker