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Night Trains are Not All Gone

So glad to see this on the maninseat61 site:

"The new timetable across Europe from 11 December will bring its usual crop of changes and alterations. Biggest is DB German Railways withdrawing its City Night Line sleeper trains, mitigated by ÖBB Austrian Railways taking over many routes under the new brand name NightJet.

Amsterdam to Munich & Zurich are withdrawn.

Cologne to Warsaw & Prague are withdrawn, no replacement.

Zurich-Prague taken over by ÖBB, but routed via Linz not Dresden.

Hamburg-Munich taken over by ÖBB and extended to Innsbruck.

Hamburg-Zurich & Berlin-Zurich replaced by an ÖBB sleeper Hamburg-Berlin-Zurich.

Munich-Venice & Munich-Florence-Rome taken over by ÖBB with some slight re-routing.

Unaffected: Munich-Budapest, Munich-Zagreb, Berlin-Budapest, Berlin-Vienna.

New ÖBB sleeper Dusseldorf & Cologne to Munich & Innsbruck.

Other notable changes with the new December timetable...

The new Gotthard Base Tunnel will open, cutting 35 minutes off Zurich-Milan times, at the expense of putting the most scenic part of one of Europe's most scenic main lines underground.

The Belgrade-Sofia overnight couchette train is discontinued, leaving just the daytime train on this route. This will be retimed, sadly breaking the connection with the Sofia-Istanbul train. There are rumours that the Moscow-Budapest-Belgrade-Sofia Russian sleeper will be curtailed to run just Moscow-Budapest, but this is not official yet.

Paris-Moscow Express reduces from 3 per week to once per week, but a new twice-weekly Berlin-Moscow Talgo sleeper train is introduced.

The Prague-Linz (for Salzburg) route gets a makeover: 2 or 3 direct trains per day become 5 per day, speeded up by up to 45 minutes.

There will be up to 3 extra ICE trains per day between Brussels, Cologne & Frankfurt, increasing journey opportunities between London, Brussels and the rest of Europe via this route.

There will be a welcome new summer-only day train called the Cracovia between Prague and Krakow, a route very popular with tourists but neglected by train operators."

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14980 posts

Thanks for the info...the first piece of good news from The Man in Seat61 on night trains since the first news indicating DB cutting service on CNL and then ciscontinuing CNL totally. I always thought with CNL gone by Dec 2016 it was inconceivable that night service would be dropped. The news here show the contrary with numerous routes still in operation by EN trains and that the CNL routes inside Germany have been taken over by ÕBB.