Welcome to the new night trains!

The network Back-on-Track welcomes new night trains and advocates for a pan-European sleeper train network

On December 11th, we will celebrate the return of the long-awaited sleeper train connecting Berlin and Paris. On the same day, there will be a new night train between Brussels and Berlin, and brand-new night train carriages will enter into service on the routes Hamburg-Vienna and Hamburg-Innsbruck. Almost at the same time, France will restart a night train connecting Paris to Aurillac (in central France), 20 years after its withdrawal!

The network Back-on-Track, which promotes sleeper trains in Europe as an alternative to flying, welcomes this good news and is pleased to see that overnight trains are becoming a more and more popular means of transport across Europe.

But, in order to massively develop night trains, so that all European citizens have access to this climate-friendly option, much more remains to be done. Among important actions, Back-on-Track calls on decision-makers to engage to develop more night trains (there is for example no connection to Spain or Portugal!), but also to make it easier to buy train tickets to travel across the continent, and to tax aviation according to its climate impact, to make trains cheaper than planes.

Back-on-Track also wishes to stress that leaving all to the market won’t do the job: like the majority of trains running in Europe, most night trains are not profitable and need public funding. Hence, to develop a true European-wide network accessible to all, a decisive implication of the public authorities is required.

To celebrate these victories and to call for more action, activists of the network Back-on-Track will gather in several places on the occasion of these inaugurations :

→ in Hamburg-Altona station, on December 11th, with a welcoming event in the morning and a bigger event at 7pm, to celebrate the first run of the brand-new couchette and sleeper coaches, and to ask for more connections to Scandinavia. This new rolling stock was ordered 5 years ago by the Austrian national railway company, ÖBB. So, if we want more night trains to run in Europe by 2030, new trains should be ordered now!

→ in Berlin main station, on December 11th, at 7pm on platform 8, to applaud the first departure of the new night train to Paris, after almost 10 years of fighting for its return!

→ in Brussels-Midi station on December 12th, for the arrival of the night train from Berlin in the morning and for the first departure to Berlin, in the evening.

→ in Paris Gare de l’Est on December 12th at 6pm, to celebrate the first departure of the night train to Berlin.

→ and in more than 20 other cities in France in December and January, including Lyon, Marseille, Strasbourg, Nice, Nantes, to ask the French State to launch the construction of 600 new night train carriages to relaunch 25 lines (including international lines and transverse connections not serving Paris), as suggested by a study of the French government itself. A map of the planned events may be found on ouiautraindenuit.wordpress.com/agenda