Europe's night train map is growing faster than the tunnels beneath it

Warsaw moved closer to Munich. Berlin nudged towards Paris. Aachen slipped nearer to Salzburg. The Guardian reported on 14 December 2024 that these three city pairs gained direct night trains in a single timetable change. None had a direct daytime alternative.

The mechanics are mundane: every December, rail operators across Europe rewrite their schedules. The consequences are not. The Warsaw-bound train that left Munich on the evening of 10 December 2024 was the first direct departure from Bavaria to Poland since 2010, the paper noted. Paris and Berlin got back a night link severed at the start of the pandemic, when the Russian Railways service from Paris to Berlin and Moscow ran for the last time.

New routes, old tracks

The overnight revival is measurable. Dresden gained sleeping-car services to Budapest, Vienna and Graz, all three of which already had daytime trains. Salzburg and Kraków were joined by a Euronight sleeper taking almost 10 hours. Even in France, where Le Monde declared the night train finished in 2016, Béziers and Montpellier picked up direct overnight links to Paris, with fares from €19 for a seat and €29 for a couchette.

Not every change is an addition. Aarhus lost its twice-daily direct trains to Hamburg. A connecting service every two hours now changes at Kolding and, according to The Guardian, gets travellers there faster. Nuremberg went from five daily direct trains to the Czech Republic to none.

"All these new trains across Europe are creating a real buzz at Byway. We're now able to pair places in holidays where direct trains didn't exist before," said Cat Jones, CEO of flight-free operator Byway Travel.

Jones singled out the Salzburg to Kraków sleeper as an opportunity for travellers to combine two very different cities. That is the commercial logic: night trains do not have to beat daytime rail on speed. They sell the trip as accommodation.

The tunnels are the bottleneck

Above the surface, the network is being restrung route by route. Below it, the projects meant to carry the traffic are struggling. CNN reported on 26 May 2026 that the European Court of Auditors found in January that the cost of delivering eight major Trans-European Transport Network projects had risen by an average of 82% over initial estimates. The average delay across five projects is 17 years.

The EU will therefore miss its 2030 deadline for completing the core TEN-T network, a plan to upgrade 10,850 miles of rail corridors. The headline projects are still moving. The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland opened in 2016 at a cost of $11.3 billion. It cut the journey from Zürich to Milan to two and a half hours from four. Its twin bores lie more than 7,500 feet beneath the Alpine peaks at their deepest point. Austria, France and Italy are building the next generation of base tunnels. Denmark is working on a road-rail link under the Baltic Sea to Germany due in the early 2030s.

• Gotthard Base Tunnel: 35 miles, opened June 2016, $11.3 billion.
• TEN-T core network: 10,850 miles of corridors, 2030 deadline, now out of reach.
• Eight major TEN-T projects: costs up 82% on average, five projects delayed by 17 years on average.

Nick Brooks, secretary general of the rail operator lobby group ALLRAIL, told CNN that "mega-projects like the Brenner Base Tunnel, Lyon–Turin and the Fehmarn Belt can be game-changers for European rail." The word choice is his, not the auditors'.

There is a second front opening away from the Alps. Croatia's government confirmed it will keep free public rail transport for children, school pupils, full-time students, pensioners and citizens over 65, according to Croatia Week. From 1 January 2026, it extended this to holders of a National or European Disability Card marked eligible for train travel. Eligible residents of Istria County can now use the direct Pula to Zagreb service free of charge, even though the route runs through Slovenia. Those trains, reintroduced on 20 June 2025, run Fridays from Zagreb and Sundays from Pula.

Meanwhile the older, cheaper end of the tradition persists elsewhere. NPR reported on 17 February 2025 that train hopping in the United States, illegal and dangerous, has been repackaged by content creators with GoPros. James Payne of the Federal Railroad Administration told NPR that trespassing incidents, injuries and deaths have been climbing steadily since 2014. He noted that social media mimicry is a growing concern. A popular train-hopping YouTuber, James "Stobe the Hobo" Stobie, died in 2017 in an apparent rail accident.

The contrast is the story. Europe is adding sleeper services faster than it is adding the tunnels that would let them run at speed. The auditors' numbers suggest the gap will not close by 2030.