Technical problem halts trains in northern Germany

BERLIN — Train services were halted temporarily across a swath of northern Germany on Saturday morning because of what the national railway operator said was a technical problem with communications.

More than two hours after operator Deutsche Bahn first reported the issue, it said that the problem — a “failure of the digital train radio system” — had been resolved but that some disruption could still be expected. It wasn’t immediately clear what led to the problem.

Earlier, Deutsche Bahn said that no long-distance or regional trains were running in the northwestern states of Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Bremen. That meant that trains between Berlin and Cologne, and between the capital and Amsterdam, also weren’t running, while trains from Denmark weren’t crossing the border into Germany.