For several hours on Saturday, nothing happened in the greater Frankfurt area. Trains and S-Bahn were stopped and thousands of travelers were stranded. The railway has now announced the cause of the failure of the radio system and promised improvements.
According to Deutsche Bahn, a series of errors caused by a local supplier outage disrupted train service in the greater Frankfurt area. There was no work for more than two hours on Saturday. Trains and S-Bahns were halted, and there were “significant delays and cancellations” later in the day, as well as trains that had to pass through Frankfurt.
The railway said its own emergency power supply was operational on Tuesday, but a technical error occurred when the emergency power was switched back to the main power supply. Two hours later, technicians were able to fix the problem.
Now the company is trying to draw the right conclusions from the wireless system collapse. “We have learned from the incident and are currently adjusting our diagnostic systems so that if these errors occur again, we can detect them earlier and eliminate them. Faster.”
Frankfurt train station has 1,200 trains per day.
According to a Deutsche Bahn spokesperson, it was due to a fault in the railway’s GSM-R radio system. Without this system, the trains cannot operate.
In the greater Frankfurt area, not only S-Bahn trains but also long-distance and regional traffic were affected by the radio interference. The Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund (RMV) advised travelers to switch to buses, subways and trams where possible.
According to travel information from Deutsche Bahn, Vias trains, which operate regional trains between Frankfurt and southern Hesse, were also affected.
Frankfurt is considered one of Europe’s most important hubs, with around 1,200 regional and long-distance trains running regularly every day.
