The disruption affected Deutsche Bahn’s long-distance and regional services, DB-operated S-Bahn networks, private operators and rail freight traffic.
According to dpa, trains were held at stations from around 22:30 on Tuesday evening. The first services began moving again at around 00:30, although DB warned that delays and cancellations could continue into the Wednesday morning peak.
The railway company said it had identified the cause of the failure but did not provide further details. The problem affected GSM-R, the digital radio system used for safety-related communication between train drivers and railway control centres.
DB CEO Evelyn Palla told Bild that the company had been able to “stabilise the situation with an emergency system”. DB offered affected passengers taxi and hotel vouchers and, where possible, allowed them to remain aboard stationary trains.
Die Zeit reported that the entire Berlin S-Bahn network was suspended, while trains were also stopped across the Stuttgart S-Bahn network. Hamburg’s Hochbahn metro services were not affected by the railway radio failure.
Freight operations were also halted during the outage, which occurred during the evening and night period when a large share of German rail freight services operate. Germany’s private freight railway association has called for an independent review of the incident rather than relying solely on DB InfraGO’s internal assessment.
The shutdown lasted around two hours. While Germany has previously suspended large parts of its railway network because of severe weather, a nationwide halt caused by a technical failure is unusual.
