Night trains and border crossings: Europe’s best new rail routes
18.12.2023 - 15:11
/ theguardian.com
/ Best New
Warsaw has just moved closer to Munich, Berlin nudged towards Paris, and Aachen slipped nearer to Salzburg. These are just three examples of city pairs that are newly linked, as of this week, by direct night trains. None of these city pairs currently has direct daytime trains, so the overnight options create a web of opportunities. As always in December, rail operators across Europe are introducing new schedules, along the way creating tantalising links where none existed before.
In Britain the changes ushered in with the 2024 timetables are hardly dramatic; many services have just been tweaked by a minute or two here and there. There are extra trains on weekdays between Nottingham and Birmingham and some thinning out (yet again) of TransPennine Express schedules.
However, across the Channel, the unstoppable rail renaissance continues apace, with many new services in the 2024 schedules. In much of Europe those 2024 timetables were introduced on 10 December. There are exceptions. A new high-speed line through Spain’s Cantabrian mountains opened in late November, and new timetables for some routes in Poland and the Baltic states won’t come into effect for another week or two.
For the most part, the 2024 timetables are good news for rail travellers. Of course, there are winners and losers. Copenhagen secures more direct services to Hamburg, while Aarhusloses out as its direct trains to Hamburg are axed. Few will shed too many tears in Aarhus as the compensation for losing those twice-daily direct trains is a new connecting service every two hours from Denmark’s second-largest city which, with an easy same-platform change of train in Kolding, will get travellers to Hamburg faster than the direct trains.
Rail services shape our mental maps of Europe. The German city of Nuremberg was for years a jumping-off point for rail journeys to the Czech Republic. The range of Czech destinations from Nuremberg has been trimmed over the years, but until last week there were still five direct trains each day to the Czech Republic. Now there are none, although, in fairness, there is no shortage of other cross-border routes linking Germany with the Czech Republic.
Each year’s new timetables create links between communities that just a few weeks earlier were unconnected. Paris and Berlin now have a direct night train, reinstating a link that was severed at the start of the pandemic when the Russian Railways train from Paris to Berlin and Moscow ran for the last time. As of this week, the historic cities of Aachen and Halle find themselves linked by a new direct night train. A Nightjet leaves the city of Charlemagne just after 9pm and arrives 10 hours later in Halle, the city in central Germany which so profoundly