In the United Kingdom trains get delayed or taken out of service for all sorts of reasons, strikes by staff, the wrong sort of snow and leaves on the line. However in Austria trains get delayed by the ghost of a uni-testicled nutcase.

The BBC said:

Travellers on an intercity train in Austria were startled on Sunday when a recording of an Adolf Hitler speech was played on board.

Instead of the normal announcements, a crowd could also be heard shouting “Heil Hitler” and “Sieg Heil” over the train’s speaker system.

The operator said there had been several such incidents in recent days.

One passenger on the Bregenz-Vienna service told the BBC that everyone on the train was “completely shocked”.

David Stoegmueller, a Green Party MP, said the speech by the Nazi German leader was played over the intercom shortly before the train, an ÖBB Railjet 661, arrived in Vienna.

“We heard two episodes,” he said. “First there was 30 seconds of a Hitler speech, and then I heard ‘Sieg Heil’.”

Mr Stoegmueller said the train staff were unable to stop the recording and were unable to make their own announcements. “One crew member was really upset,” he added.

At first when this story emerged I thought that it might have been that the cause of Austria’s ‘Hitler rant’ incident might be due to having an in-train communications system that was a) insecure and b) easily captured by stronger and more dominating radio signals in a similar way to how pranksters in the late 1970’s hijacked a Southern Television transmitting station to broadcast a message purporting to come from a bunch of aliens.

The other possibility was that the former GLC leader Ken Livingstone, who had made false claims during an interview about the Nazis and the Zionists being in collaboration, has been on a working holiday with Austrian railways.

But it has turned out to be the case that this was not an over the air hack or a computer vulnerability that caused this problem, but an insecure staff telephone intercom cabinet. According to press reports the hoaxers got into the box containing the intercom handset using a key that fits all Austrian railway intercom boxes. Two people, not railway employees, have been arrested in connection with this incident and are also being questioned about other incidents where intercoms have been illicitly used.