The act of sabotage, which targeted radio link cables, paralyzed traffic for about 3 hours this Saturday in the north of the country.
Rail traffic was completely interrupted on Saturday for about three hours in northern Germany due to an act of “sabotage“aiming at radio link cables”essential for the movement of trains“, indicated the Deutsche Bahn company which, at first, had evoked a “train digital radio system failure». «Cables essential to operation have been deliberately 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 “still known“. The federal police were in charge of the investigation.
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 North Rhineland. -Westphalia. The Berlin-Amsterdam link had also been suspended. However, cancellations and delays were still to be expected on Saturday during the day despite the restoration of rail links, warned Deutsche Bahn.
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The company, regularly singled out for the many delays on its lines, announced at the beginning of September that it had to carry out titanic work, including 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. Tested throughout the summer in Germany, a monthly ticket at 9 euros allowing travel on the entire German network (excluding high-speed trains) has met with great success, with approximately 52 million tickets sold. This subscription, financed by the State and which saved 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 emissions according to official data, could be replaced by a slightly more expensive ticket.
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