A railway in northern Germany has been hit by a suspected arson attack, bringing train services to a standstill days after a similar incident caused major disruption in the west of the country, authorities said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Police said they were treating the incident as arson after a distribution box caught fire overnight in the town of Neu Wulmstorf overnight. A spokeswoman for national railway operator Deutsche Bahn said train services on the line between Hamburg and Cuxhaven were affected.<\/p>\n
The company said it was initially unable to give a forecast for how long repairs would take. “We are working flat out around the clock,” a spokesman said in the evening.<\/p>\n
More than 200 train services were cancelled and had to be replaced by buses, with thousands of passengers facing detours and longer journey times, a spokeswoman for the Hamburg S-Bahn suburban train network said.<\/p>\n
A witness reported seeing flames at a technical building at a level crossing at around 1:15 am (2315 GMT Monday), police said. When the first emergency services arrived, the fire had almost burned out – but a distribution box 50 metres away was ablaze.<\/p>\n
The second fire damaged signal cables, causing train services to be suspended, police said. The fire brigade extinguished the blaze.<\/p>\n
Police secured evidence at the scene of the fires. The evidence pointed to arson, a police spokesman said, though the perpetrators’ identity remained unclear. Police said they were urgently appealing for witnesses.<\/p>\n
A suspected arson attack also disrupted a major rail line in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia at the weekend on the main line between Dusseldorf and Cologne. Security sources suspected an act of sabotage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A railway in northern Germany has been hit by a suspected arson attack, bringing train services to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43639,30850,5,43641,2628,43640],"class_list":["post-54692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-arson-attack","tag-cuxhaven","tag-germany","tag-neu-wulmstorf","tag-northern-germany","tag-train-services"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}