Belated Y2K Bug Bites Norway

O S L O, Norway, Jan. 2 -- The Y2K computer glitch hit Norway’snational railroad company a year later than expected.

The bug was discovered when none of the company’s new 16 airportexpress trains or 13 high-speed, long-distance Signatur trainswould start early in the morning of Dec. 31.

The computers on board the trains apparently did not recognizethe date, something not anticipated by experts who checked thesystems thoroughly last year in anticipation of problems fearedworldwide when the clocks rolled to Jan. 1, 2000, a spokesman said.

“We didn’t think of trying out the date 31/12/00,” said RonnySolberg of Adtranz, the German producer of the new trains.

Temporary Fix

Sunday’s problem was quickly solved on a temporary basis byresetting the computers to Dec. 1, 2000, and the trains startedupon ignition.

“Now we have one month to find out what went wrong so we canfix the problem for good,” Solberg was quoted as saying by thedaily newspaper Dagbladet.

The older trains that still make up most of the NSB staterailroad’s fleet were not affected.

The problem had little impact on train traffic as the airportexpress trains were quickly put back on schedule, and some oldertrains were used on the two long-distance routes affected by theglitch. All trains were running as usual by Monday, according tothe Norwegian news agency NTB.

Y2K was caused by decisions by computer makers decades ago touse two digits to represent the year. The shortcut saved money onmemory and storage, but also caused some computers to wronglyinterpret 2000 as 1900.

After billions of dollars and months of preparation worldwide,few problems were recorded last year.