Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem

What is surprising is that GSM-R is 2g. Does not 2g have many security issues?

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.

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 ..

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

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.)

Probably someone forgot to renew the TLS certificate.

These are effective targets for hybrid warfare for that very reason, plausible deniability

Same thing happened in Poland and it was confirmed that Russians did it.

You mean neglect?

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.

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-...

Maybe. OP isn't saying it's necessarily malicious interference though.

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

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

AI vibes all the place!

>This special mobile communication standard is designed to make communication fail-safe

Mmm, nope.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seems like the failsafe also failed today.

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.

Mainly Meta Services, which seem to spike, isn't it? And Google Fiber

Its return train is currently stuck at Oberhausen.

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

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.

@dang please update if you see this

And merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651613

I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be incompetence at this point.

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.

and submitted by the same user sva_

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sva_

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...