The bug was discovered when none of the national rail company’s 16 modern airport express trains or 13 long-distance Signatur trains would not start on Sunday. The computers did not recognise the date 31/12/00.
The company’s temporary solution was to simply reset the computers to 01/12/00 which enabled the trains to start. This gives the company one month to find out why the computers did not recognise the new date and to fix the problem. The delay caused by the error had little impact on train traffic.
The international cost of preparation for the Millennium Bug in the late 1990s ran into the billions of pounds. Few incidents were reported in January last year.