Northern Germany | “Sabotage” paralyzes rail traffic

(Berlin) An act of “sabotage” targeting radio cables caused the paralysis of rail traffic in northern Germany on Saturday morning.

For nearly three hours, in the north of the country, all high-speed and regional connections, as well as freight transport, were interrupted.

After the partial restoration of traffic, the Deutsche Bahn company claimed that “sabotage” was the cause of the breakdown.

This sabotage targeted “cables essential for the movement of trains”, the German company told AFP.

“Cables essential to the operation were voluntarily and intentionally severed”, confirmed the Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing, in a statement to the press.

“It is clear that this is a targeted and deliberate action”, he added, specifying that the motive was not “yet known”.

The federal police were in charge of the investigation.

It would be more precisely the GSM-R radio network of the trains used for communication with the drivers, but also, more generally, of “central interface between the trains and the infrastructure” of control, according to Spiegel, the first media to discuss, citing security sources, suspicions of sabotage.

Stranded Travelers

“We now know that the cables were intentionally cut in two places,” said Mr. Wissing, referring to a “clearly premeditated act”.

“Fiber optic cables” would thus have been cut in Berlin and in North Rhine-Westphalia (west), the most populated region of Germany, specifies for its part the popular daily Bild.

Such an action would not be within the reach of the first comer and would require “certain knowledge” of the rail system, underline sources close to Deutsche Bahn with Picture.

The incident notably led to an interruption of connections between Berlin and certain regions in the west and north of the country such as Schleswig-Holstein, the cities of Hamburg and Bremen or even Lower Saxony and part of Rhineland. -North-Westphalia.

The Berlin-Amsterdam link had also been suspended.

Thousands of travelers thus remained stranded in stations on Saturday morning.

Cancellations and delays were still to be expected on Saturday during the day despite the restoration of rail links, warned Deutsche Bahn.

Reinforced monitoring

This act comes just over two weeks after sabotage actions targeting the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines linking Russia to Germany.

The German government had in the process reinforced the protection of its critical infrastructures.

Deutsche Bahn is regularly singled out for the many delays on its lines. It had thus announced at the beginning of September that it would have to carry out titanic work, in particular with the replacement of 137,000 concrete sleepers, to upgrade its tracks.

The derailment of a train in the Bavarian Alps at the beginning of June, which had caused the death of five people and injured more than 40, had provided a tragic illustration of the poor state of the German lines, linked to years of underinvestment.

These failures fall all the more badly as the government encourages in recent months the Germans, great followers of the car, to take the train by proposing, with the regions, tickets at low prices.