From the new Swedish Government agreement between Socialdemocrates, the Center-party and the Green
Extend the infrastructure – connect Sweden with trains that go on time
The decided national plan for infrastructure 2018–2029 with investments in roads and railways across the country of SEK 700 billion will be completed. New high-speed railways will be completed so that Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and regions and cities along and in connection with the track’s route are better linked with modern and sustainable communications. There will be continued expansion of the railway in northern Sweden and the planning to build the Norrbotnia railway in its entirety will be intensified. The broad funding discussion between seven parliamentary parties must be resumed and constitute the starting point for the continued work on the project. Today’s Eurovignette fee for freight transport should be kept as long as possible. A new environmental management system should be investigated (Added in spring 2019).
A national ticketing system for all public transport throughout Sweden is introduced (Investigation 2020. Introduced 7 from January 1, 2022).
The government must act to make it easier to book a trip abroad by train. The Swedish Transport Administration is commissioned to procure night trains with daily departures to several European cities.
>> Read it all (in Swedish)
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I would still be careful about all that. The first word in the document “Utkast” means “Draft”, this is on the website of the Green Party who obviously wants sustainable transport, but I don’t know if this is the actual agreement between the parties, or if this is the Green Party’s first draft that will still be watered down by the others. Also, those are declarations of intention, but there is no guarantee that this will become true. Don’t get me wrong, nobody would love night trains to Germany more than I do, I’m a German living in the Stockholm region and being able to take a night train to Hamburg would be the best thing ever, but let’s wait and see.
I would change your headline from “New Swedish Government will procure night trains to Europe” to “New Swedish Government intends to procure night trains to Europe” or even “New Swedish Government talks about night trains to Europe”
One strange thing about Sweden is that many private households have really high loans on their house/apartment while the government doesn’t want to take any loans and they want to pay the highspeed network with their ordinary budget which will take 70 years (!) to build. I guess this number is just out there to let people stumble over it so that more people agree to take a loan for this investment, but all people say is “we should invest that money rather in maintaining our existing network”, which would not help, because the problem is that we don’t have any capacity left and without building new tracks we will not be able to solve any of the problems we currently have, like the abysmal reliability. Technically punctuality is 90%, but long-distance trains are more like 70%. There is no time for construction work and the smallest disturbance affects dozens of trains. We need those high speed tracks, but even in the best of all scenarios we are at least 15 years away, maybe 20, and of course this big investment takes a lot of the attention.
I still really hope that we get those night trains! Trafikverket has procured (I’m not sure that is the right word) trains to Jämtland in order to connect that region to Stockholm/Göteborg and there is absolutely a possibility to do the same to Germany. However, we currently don’t have any rolling stock that is allowed to go over the bridge to Denmark and we are short on rolling stock anyway and probably don’t have enough coaches left for at least two new train sets, so it is not just paying an operator to run the trains, but they would have to buy a lot of new train cars as well.
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