Europe's Night Trains Are Back, but the Tunnel Bill Is Still Coming

Munich and Warsaw are once again joined by a direct night train. The first departure left Bavaria for Poland on the evening of 10 December 2023, the Guardian reported. It was the first direct service on the route since 2010. The same timetable change brought back a Paris to Berlin overnight link that had been cut at the start of the pandemic, when the Russian Railways service from Paris to Berlin and Moscow ran for the last time.

None of this happened in isolation. Rail operators across Europe bring in new schedules every December. The 2024 timetables, introduced for the most part on 10 December 2023, produced a cluster of new overnight connections.

Warsaw moved closer to Munich. Berlin nudged towards Paris. Aachen slipped nearer to Salzburg. According to the Guardian, none of those city pairs had direct daytime trains at the time, so the overnight options created links where no link existed. The Guardian called the trend an "unstoppable rail renaissance" continuing across the Channel. British changes were limited to minor tweaks and extra weekday services between Nottingham and Birmingham.

New routes, and the operators selling them

Some of the new services fill obvious gaps. A Nightjet leaves Aachen just after 9pm and arrives ten hours later in Halle, a route the Guardian notes should appeal to anyone interested in German history. Dresden gained sleeping-car services to Budapest, Vienna and Graz, all three of which already had daytime trains from the Saxon city. The new Salzburg to Kraków sleeper takes almost 10 hours. According to Cat Jones, CEO of the flight-free travel operator Byway Travel, it gives travellers a way to combine two very different cities.

"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," Jones said, according to the Guardian.

France is part of the shift, despite a 2016 Le Monde headline declaring the night train finished. Béziers and Montpellier gained direct links to Paris on some nights. A new Aurillac to Paris overnight service has no competing daytime train at all. The French trains are basic: no sleeping cars, so passengers choose between a reclining seat and a couchette. Fares start at €19 for seats and €29 for couchettes, the Guardian reported.

Cross-border frequency improved elsewhere too. Munich to Zürich gained services, following the November reinstatement of direct Stuttgart to Zürich trains. Berlin to Amsterdam was trimmed by 30 minutes to under six hours. Direct daytime trains from Kraków to Vienna and Berlin doubled from one to two. Wrocław gained an early-morning direct train to Vienna with a late-afternoon return. A second direct train from Vienna to Ukraine began running, with through-carriages to Chop in Transcarpathia.

There were losers as well. Aarhus lost its twice-daily direct trains to Hamburg. The Guardian noted the compensation is a connecting service every two hours via a same-platform change at Kolding that gets travellers to Hamburg faster than the direct train did. Nuremberg, long a jumping-off point for Czech destinations, went from five direct trains a day to the Czech Republic to none.

The carbon case, and the fare problem

Industry data has reinforced the environmental argument for rail. The Rail Delivery Group, which represents Britain's rail industry, published analysis in February 2024 claiming that on average across the top 100 business travel routes, a diesel or petrol car produced nine times more carbon than going by train. A plug-in hybrid produced four times more, and a battery electric car almost two and a half times more.

The granularity matters here. The RDG said its figures incorporate train types and occupancy. Certain journeys on the greenest, fullest electric trains produce as little as one-fifteenth of the CO2 per person compared with a sole-occupancy petrol or diesel car. On Edinburgh to London Kings Cross, the RDG data puts emissions at 116kg of CO2 in a diesel car, 31.8kg in a battery car and 12.7kg per person by train.

Campaigners accepted the green claim but pointed at the price. A single fare on LNER, the main operator on that route, was £183 without pre-booking at the time of the Guardian's report, though cheaper advance fares existed. Average fuel costs for a small petrol car over the same 400 miles were roughly £50, and significantly less for an electric car. Michael Solomon Williams of the charity Campaign for Better Transport told the Guardian that train travel is "always greener than driving" and often quicker, but that the priority now is making it cheaper. Rail fares across England were due to rise by 4.9%.

The RDG's chief executive, Jacqueline Starr, said the data would let businesses measure emissions accurately on the 100 most popular business rail journeys. "We all have a responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint, and the data that we have published reveals that rail is the green choice for travel between our towns and cities," she said, according to the Guardian.

The tunnels that decide whether any of this scales

New timetables can only rearrange capacity that exists. The bigger constraint is geography, and the answer to geography is tunnels, which are late and expensive. The European Court of Auditors reported in January 2026 that the costs of delivering eight major Trans-European Transport Network projects had increased by an average of 82% over initial estimates, with an average delay across five projects of 17 years, according to CNN. The EU will not meet its 2030 deadline for completing the core TEN-T network of 10,850 miles of rail corridors.

The projects themselves are enormous. Switzerland's Gotthard Base Tunnel opened in 2016 at a cost of $11.3 billion, with twin tunnels more than 7,500 feet below the Alpine peaks at their deepest. It cut Zürich to Milan to two and a half hours, against four hours on the older, 25-mile-longer Gotthard route. The Fehmarnbelt Tunnel between Denmark and Germany, an 18km immersed link with a construction budget of over €7 billion, is due to open in 2029. Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company behind it, says Copenhagen to Hamburg will fall from around four and a half hours to two and a half, and the crossing itself from 45 minutes by ferry to seven by train.

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 court of auditors' numbers suggest the game will take longer to change than the schedules imply.