And merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651613
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
“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...
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.
Was it similar to what we’re seeing now (nationwide, radio related)?
>> 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.
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.
British person living in Berlin.
[0] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/nationwide-gsmr-outage-...
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."
Mmm, nope.
Interference led to the network stopping, not trains just racing towards each other due to bogus line authorities. That is, by definition, fail-safe
Although NL rail travelers are usually quite good at anticipating, and adjust their schedule. So might just be a quieter-than-usual day.
https://xn--allestrungen-9ib.de/en/
These could be based on different scales of numbers since it is midnight in Germany
* https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/german-train-service-suspende...
* https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/german-rail-service-suspended...
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...
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.
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.
[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.]
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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienförmige_Zugbeeinflussung
>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.
tl;dr: Trains can be stopped by a transmitting a simple, documented tone sequence over analog radio.
Honestly, DB are perfectly capable of clusterf*cking their GSM-R without help from Russia.
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.
According to whom?
source: https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/themen/infrastruktur/inve...
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...
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 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.
Trains in Germany and the UK for main-line running both use 1435mm gauge. UK trains are not a custom size.
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.
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.
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.
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.