According to a company spokeswoman, Deutsche Bahn’s rail traffic between Hamburg and Berlin is likely to be disrupted until Saturday due to several arson attacks. “A resumption of traffic between Hamburg and Berlin will probably not be possible until Saturday morning,” a railway spokeswoman said on Friday.
After several fires in cable shafts, investigators assume a political motive. The police announced this on Friday in Hamburg. A spokesman for the Hamburg fire department reported that supply lines for signaling and communication technology were affected by the fires. A DB spokesman also said that a fire “on the infrastructure of Deutsche Bahn in Hamburg” had caused the outages. Local transport connections are also affected.
“Some of the long-distance trains are being rerouted via Uelzen or are canceled,” the railway said. Diversions via Uelzen usually cause delays of around 30 minutes on the route between Hamburg and Berlin. The DB’s online timetable information showed that around two thirds of the ICE connections between Hamburg and Berlin are currently canceled.
“As an alternative, journeys with a change in Hanover are also possible. This increases the journey time,” said a DB spokesman. A resumption of traffic between Hamburg and Berlin will probably only be possible again in the course of the evening. According to DB information, ICE and IC trains between Hamburg – Rostock – Stralsund (- Ostseebad Binz) were also affected by the vandalism damage – trains were also canceled here.
According to a report by the Hamburger Morgenpost There was a fire in several cable shafts on railway lines in Hamburg. Unknown people are said to have opened the cable ducts and deliberately set fire. The individual fires were small, but still had major consequences. As the newspaper further reports, the fire brigade and police were on duty between three and four o’clock. Fires in cable shafts were reported in three locations in Hamburg. The train drivers are said to have extinguished some of the fires themselves.
Because they said they heard noises next to the railway embankment, police officers searched the area. The police are investigating but are keeping a low profile. A kind of confession letter has now appeared on the Internet. On “indymedia.org” unknown people claim that they have sabotaged “arteries of the capitalist infrastructure”. They limited themselves to sections that were “only intended for freight traffic”. That didn’t work out, but the perpetrators are probably more than happy about that.