Europe's Night Train Map Redraws Itself as New Timetables Land

Warsaw moved closer to Munich. Berlin nudged towards Paris. Aachen slipped nearer to Salzburg. The Guardian's roundup of the December 2023 European timetable change lists all three pairs as newly linked by direct night trains. None had a direct daytime train, so the overnight services open connections where none existed.

The timetables came into effect on 10 December across much of Europe. Two exceptions: a new high-speed line through Spain's Cantabrian mountains opened in late November, and new schedules for some routes in Poland and the Baltic states were still a week or two away.

The Munich to Warsaw train that left Bavaria on the evening of 10 December was the first direct departure from that region to Poland since 2010, the Guardian reported. The same wave of changes produced a new night link between Salzburg and Kraków that takes almost 10 hours. Byway, a flight-free operator, flagged the route as a way to pair two very different cities in one trip.

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

Paris and Berlin regained a direct overnight service, reinstating a link severed at the start of the pandemic, when the Russian Railways train from Paris to Berlin and Moscow ran for the last time, according to the same piece. Elsewhere in the new schedules, Dresden picked up sleeping-car service to Budapest, Vienna and Graz. All three already had daytime trains from the Saxon city.

Not every change is an addition. Nuremberg, long a jumping-off point for rail journeys into the Czech Republic, lost its five daily direct trains to the country, leaving none, though other cross-border routes between Germany and the Czech Republic remain. Aarhus lost its twice-daily direct trains to Hamburg. A connecting service every two hours, with a same-platform change at Kolding, makes up for it and gets travellers to Hamburg faster than the direct trains did, the Guardian said.

In France, where Le Monde declared the night train finished in 2016, demand has turned up again. Béziers and Montpellier gained direct links to Paris on some nights, and a new Aurillac to Paris overnight runs where no competing daytime train exists. Fares start at €19 for seats and €29 for couchettes, and the French services have no sleeping cars.

The carbon case, and the fare problem

The rail industry has been building an emissions argument to go with the new routes. Analysis published by the Rail Delivery Group in February 2024 found that travelling by train on Britain's busiest business routes generates less than half the carbon emissions of a battery electric car. On average across the top 100 business travel routes, a diesel or petrol car produced nine times more carbon than going by train.

On Edinburgh to London Kings Cross, the RDG figures put emissions at 116kg of CO2 in a diesel car, 31.8kg in a battery car and 12.7kg per person by train.

The comparison uses the government's official figures for average executive car emissions by distance. Battery EV emissions depend largely on the source of electricity, so they should fall as renewables take over the grid. Campaigners did not dispute the carbon maths but pointed at the price. A single LNER fare on that Edinburgh route was £183 without pre-booking at the time, while average fuel costs for a small petrol car over the same 400 miles would be roughly £50. Rail fares in England were due to rise 4.9% that Sunday.

"Travelling by train is always greener than driving, and it's getting even greener as more rail routes are electrified," said Michael Solomon Williams of the charity Campaign for Better Transport. "It is often quicker too, but what we now need to do is to ensure it is also cheaper."

The RDG's chief executive, Jacqueline Starr, said the data would let businesses measure emissions on the 100 most popular business rail journeys. Business travel on rail had already slipped substantially since the pandemic, accelerating a move towards online meetings.

Two longer-term projects sit behind the timetable-level changes. The Fehmarnbelt tunnel under the Baltic Sea, an 18-kilometre immersed link between Denmark and Germany, is due to open in 2029 with a construction budget of over €7 billion. Femern A/S has said the Copenhagen to Hamburg trip would fall from around four and a half hours to two and a half, and the crossing itself from 45 minutes by ferry to seven minutes by train.

In Croatia, free public rail transport continues for children, pupils, full-time students, pensioners and citizens over 65. From 1 January 2026 it was extended to people with disabilities holding a National or European Disability Card marked eligible for train travel, according to HŽ Passenger Transport. Eligible residents of Istria County can also travel free on the direct Pula to Zagreb service, reintroduced on 20 June 2025, which runs through Slovenia on Fridays and Sundays.

None of this settles whether the night train revival pays for itself. The pattern in the December 2023 data is narrower than the headlines: new links where operators spotted an opening, withdrawn links where a faster connection beat the direct one, and a French network selling reclining seats at €19 because there are no sleeping cars to sell.