LLM summary:
The Czech Republic’s transport minister warns of Russia’s attempts to disrupt European rail networks, suspected to be part of a campaign to destabilize the EU. Thousands of hacking attempts, including attacks on signalling systems, have been made since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the Czech Republic has managed to defend against these attacks, concerns remain about potential accidents. Similar attacks have targeted railway companies in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Estonia. Prague is taking measures to strengthen cybersecurity and limit foreign involvement in critical infrastructure projects, advocating for more EU funding for transport infrastructure to address increasing demand and alleviate strain on conventional operators.
Good that I’m living in Germany where sabotaging the railway system would probably make it better.
All I have ever heard about Germany(…mostly) is that the public transport is ridiculously good with enviable punctuality.
Public transport? Yeah,in the bigger cities it’s decent, in the rural areas it is shit,though.
But railways? Absolute utter garbage and we have a worse on time performance than Ukraine… During the war.
Your and my definition of utter garbage differ wildly.
Are they late sometimes? yes. Do some trains end up being cancelled? Also yes.
But the same applies for cars. And even more so. I can not count the times where I have been late by over an hour when driving by car. With the trains is has been much less.
Utter garbage. Period.
I travel around 60k km per year, a fair share of it by train and have travelled about two thirds of the European countries by train.
And I have the luxury to use the Austrian, Swiss, French, Italian systems on a monthly basis - each of them is far far better.
Trains are the superior travel system. And if you are lucky you have an urban train system that works decently. But both long range as well as freight are a dumpster fire.
It is excellent by global standards, but has suffered in recent years from setbacks. So while it’s better than almost anywhere else (besides maybe Switzerland, Austria and Japan), from the perspective of someone living in Germany, it’s declined of late. I think this explains why you often hear negative comments from Germans but positive from others.