Warsaw just got closer to Munich, Berlin got a push towards Paris and Aachen got closer to Salzburg. These are just three examples of city pairs that have been newly connected by direct night trains since this week. None of these city pairs currently have direct daytime trains, so the nighttime options create a web of possibilities. As always in December, railway companies across Europe are introducing new timetables, creating tempting connections that didn’t exist before.
In Britain, the changes introduced with the 2024 timetable are hardly dramatic; many services have been tweaked for a minute or two here and there. Extra trains will run between Nottingham and Birmingham on weekdays and the TransPennine Express timetables will be slightly thinned out (again).
Across the Channel, however, the unstoppable rail renaissance continues, with many new services on the 2024 timetable. In much of Europe, these 2024 timetables were introduced on December 10. There are exceptions. A new high-speed line through Spain’s Cantabrian mountains opened at the end of November, and new timetables for some routes in Poland and the Baltic states will not come into effect for another week or two.
Winners and losers
The timetables for 2024 are largely good news for train passengers. Of course there are winners and losers. Copenhagen secures more direct connections to Hamburg, while Aarhus loses because direct trains to Hamburg are stopped. Few will shed too many tears in Aarhus, as the compensation for the loss of those twice-daily direct trains is a new connecting service departing every two hours from Denmark’s second-largest city and which, with an easy change at the same platform in Kolding, will attract travelers to Hamburg faster than the direct trains.
Rail services form our mental maps of Europe. The German city of Nuremberg was for many years a starting point for train journeys to the Czech Republic. The range of Czech destinations from Nuremberg has been shortened over the years, but until last week there were still five direct trains to the Czech Republic every day. Now there are none, although honestly there is no shortage of other cross-border routes connecting Germany to the Czech Republic.
Each year’s new timetables create connections between communities that were disconnected just a few weeks earlier. Paris and Berlin now have a direct night train, restoring the connection that was severed at the beginning of the pandemic when the Russian Railways train from Paris to Berlin and Moscow ran for the last time. From this week, the historic cities of Aachen and Halle will be connected by a new direct night train. A Nightjet leaves Charlemagne’s city just after 9 p.m. and arrives 10 hours later in Halle, the city in central Germany that so profoundly influenced the Pietist movement. What better trip for anyone interested in German history?
New chances
Tour operators and travel agents are quickly diving into December’s new train schedules to create new itineraries. Cat Jones, CEO of flight-free operator Byway Travel, said: “All these new trains across Europe are creating a lot of excitement at Byway. We can now link places to holidays where direct trains previously did not exist. For example, the new Euronight direct line connecting Salzburg with Krakow offers a real opportunity for culture lovers [trips to] two very different cities.”
The new connection between Salzburg and Krakow takes almost ten hours and is one of the many new city pairs opened by the new night train connecting Munich with Warsaw. The Warsaw-bound train that left Munich on the evening of December 10 was the first direct departure from Bavaria to Poland since 2010.
In the new timetable we see many city pairs that are already well served by direct day trains that secure a night connection. Starting this week, travelers can nap in the comfort of a sleeping car from Dresden to Budapest, Vienna and Graz. All three cities have long had day trains from Dresden, but now there is an additional option.
Even in France, where Le Monde declared in 2016 “Le train de nuit: c’est fini!There is an increasing demand for night trains. Béziers and Montpellier now have a direct connection to Paris on some evenings, with the first departures tomorrow. Here there is of course competition from direct day trains, with the fastest TGVs speeding from Montpellier to the capital in just over three hours. Another new French night train is the Aurillac-Paris service, which has no competing direct day trains. Like all French night trains, they offer little comfort. There are no sleeping cars, so passengers must choose between a reclining seat and a couchette. But prices are competitive, with fares starting from €19 for seats and €29 for couchettes.
Cross-border
Much criticism has been leveled at the fact that European rail operators often concentrate on their domestic market and neglect cross-border connections. The ambition of some rail companies diminishes as they approach international borders, but there are many improved cross-border opportunities. This week, the frequency between Munich and Zurich has increased, following major improvements in November, when direct trains from Stuttgart to Zurich were restored. On the busy Berlin-Amsterdam route, travel time has been reduced by 30 minutes to less than six hours.
The number of direct daytime trains from Krakow to both Vienna and Berlin is doubling from one to two and the Polish city of Wrocław is adding a new early morning direct train to Vienna, returning in the late afternoon. Since last weekend, a second direct train has been running from Vienna to Ukraine. Complementing the long-standing Euronight service from Vienna to Kiev, the morning departure from Vienna to Romania now also has through carriages to Chop, in the Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia. It is a sign of how EU-based railway companies are promoting better connectivity with western Ukraine. Czech private operator RegioJet is said to be exploring the possibility of a new direct night train from Prague to Chop from early 2024.
It is even possible that cross-border services from Lithuania to Latvia will restart before the end of the year. The usually cautious editors of the beautiful European railway timetable suggest in their recently published winter edition that “a train from Vilnius to Riga is expected to start running from December 27.” If this happens, it will be the first public train service between the two capitals since before the pandemic. And it will mean that dedicated rail travelers can once again travel all the way from England to Estonia by train without having to resort to a bus for that cross-border journey from Lithuania to Latvia.
Nicky Gardner is co-author of Europe by Rail: the Definitive Guide. The 17th edition of the book is available from the Guardian bookstore