Late Tuesday, Germany’s national rail network stopped. Every Deutsche Bahn train across the country stopped abruptly wherever it was, going nowhere. The culprit - a failure in GSM-R, the Global System for Mobile Communications for Railways. It’s the backbone of how train drivers talk to traffic control centers. When it goes down, trains don’t move. Not because there’s a safety threat in the conventional sense, but because no communication means no authorization to move, and rail safety protocols are unambiguous about that. You sit and wait.
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Normally this news would be huge, but since it’s DB it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
Yeah I am still trying to understand how a radio transmission network can have a countrywide outage…
The culprit – a failure in GSM-R, the Global System for Mobile Communications for Railways. It’s the backbone of how train drivers talk to traffic control centers. When it goes down, trains don’t move. Not because there’s a safety threat in the conventional sense, but because no communication means no authorization to move, and rail safety protocols are unambiguous about that. You sit and wait.
So the safety protocol kicked in…
I’m still with you though, as how did they not have independent backup lines, or a decentralized core? (Money I’m sure, but that seems worth it.)
I work in IT and struggle to understand how to even design it that bad.
SO many questions.