Germans were cleaning up Saturday, a day after torrential rain and high winds had knocked out power lines and halted a Prague-bound international express train, REPORTED DPA. The onset of rain on Monday ended a month and half of drought in a region stretching from northern France to Poland and climaxed with Friday's drenching. Lines went down in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg states of eastern Germany Friday. One power company, Envia, said at one point 15,000 customers in the Chemnitz region were blacked out. The Eurocity train hauled by electric locomotive from Hamburg to Prague was halted at 6 pm Friday when it reached a section of track near Herzberg, south of Berlin, where an overhead power-supply line had been cut by a falling tree. Passengers were stranded for four hours in failing light. Because the train had stopped deep in a forest, not even mobile phones worked. Unable to heat food, dining-car staff served the 400 passengers free soft drinks and cold sausages during the wait for a diesel locomotive.
