Berlin, Tuesday. In what can only be described as a catastrophic failure of digital infrastructure, the German rail network, that gleaming monument to Teutonic efficiency, has collapsed into a steaming heap of binary nonsense. Signals blinking like confused fireflies, trains frozen mid-harrumph, and the entire nation of punctuality worshippers reduced to pacing platforms muttering about *unzuverlässig* IT systems. Yes, the DB, that beloved behemoth of locomotive precision, has been brought to its knees by a glitch. A glitch of all things. One can almost hear the collective grinding of Porsche gears in frustration across the land.
And what, one might ask, does the British railway model offer in response? Cue the inevitable, smug, Whitehall-approved headline: HS2 resilience hailed as model. For the uninitiated, HS2 is that fantastical railway project so expensive, so late, and so utterly mired in bureaucratic bloat that it makes the Berlin Brandenburg Airport look like a swift and sensible undertaking. To suggest that HS2, a railway line that has thus far only successfully moved vast quantities of paperwork and ministerial apologies, is a model for anything is satire so pure it writes itself.
Of course, let us examine this 'resilience'. HS2's resilience lies in the fact it hasn't been built yet. A 'digital railway' that exists solely as a collection of tenders, consultations, and abandoned badger tunnels. It is invincible because it's vaporware. You can't hack a train that hasn't left the station. You can't glitch a signal that's still on a spreadsheet. The Germans, in their hubris, actually built their network. They laid track. They installed signals. They connected it to the internet. Classic rookie mistake. Britain, in its glorious, heritage-sector inertia, has created the world's most expensive anti-hacking system: nothing working at all.
So as Germans weep into their lagers over a nation of stationary *Intercity-Expresses*, Whitehall mandarins are patting each other on the back with the smugness of a cat that's shit in a hat shop. 'Our system is un-hackable,' they declare, 'because it's a conceptual art project funded by tax revenue.' Plans are already being drawn up for an urgent review. The review will conclude that Britain should invest more in resilience. The review will be printed out. The review will be stored in a drawer. The drawer will be locked. The key will be thrown into the Thames. The Thames is already digital. Somewhere, a spreadsheet will update itself.
Let this be a lesson to the world: efficiency is a fickle mistress. Punctuality is a software bug waiting to happen. Only by embracing total, glorious, technologically regressive incompetence can a nation truly be secure. Hail HS2. The line of the future, which will never arrive. Which is, perhaps, its greatest selling point.
