DB to withdraw all remaining sleeper trains

[Just-Thinking-51]

http://seat61.com/news.htm

http://www.railjournal.com/index.php/main-line/obb-reveals-nightjet-brand-for-overnight-trains.html

Two source of what night trains are going to be left after City Night Line drops their sleeper, and couchettes.

 

[neroden]

The main issue here is that international rail services are still weirdly restricted and overpriced in Western Europe -- and at this point, to be a reasonable length, a sleeper train *has* to be international. There's also an old and bizarre bias where the countries in the west don't think they need connectivity to the east, only to the west.

This is why *Austria* is picking up the train services, because they understand that they benefit heavily from international cross-border rail service from the west.

 

[cirdan]

What DB is doing is not unheard of in the industry in general. A company chooses to concentrate on one or two product lines and spins off the rest. happens all the time. One could quibble about the choice of business lines made to keep in house and the choices to be spun off. but the restructuring along those lines comes with the territory of evolving a company in a new competitive environment. We saw this sort of thing unfold in the US when telecommunication was deregulated.

In Germany there has been a lot of hoo ha about Stuttgart's new station, Stuttgart 21, which will replace the present surface terminal station (requiring trains to reverse) by an underground thru sttation.

Essentially it is a real estate project as acres of railroad land will become available for development. But it also offers advanatges for trains as removing the need to reverse and straieghtening out the approaches allows valuable time to be shaved off schedules.

The project met with a lot of opposition locally, both due to the costs but also due to disruption and buildings being demolished, trees cut down etc.

Chancellor Merkel defended the project saying, if people want there to be a train from Paris to Prag, they cannot delay it by forcing it to use such an old fashioned arrangement as the old station.

As Paris to Prague is clearly outside the league of any high speed train, one can only infer that she was referring to a night train. I don't think there has been a night train between paris and Prague in a while, but by suggesting that people opposing the project were preventing that train, and with DB being 100% owned by the German government, i would think there is a real case for demanding they actually run the train or make Merkel apologize for selling the project on a false premise.

 

[jis]

I am sure Merkel's utterances about trains is so far down in the list of concerns of people, considering the whole refugee issue and since trains are associated with transportation of aliens, it is a safe bet that in the current environment, hardly anyone will be in a mood to call for Merkel to apologize or feel particularly enthusiastic to run a night train from Prague to France through Germany at night. At least that is what most of my German friends tell me when I ask them about it. I spend about 10 hours in teleconferences each week with folks who live around Stuttgart and work in Beoblingen. Merkel would actually be lucky to retain her position if an election were held today. All sad but very true AFAICT.

 

[railbuck]

Chancellor Merkel defended the project saying, if people want there to be a train from Paris to Prag, they cannot delay it by forcing it to use such an old fashioned arrangement as the old station.

As Paris to Prague is clearly outside the league of any high speed train, one can only infer that she was referring to a night train. I don't think there has been a night train between paris and Prague in a while, but by suggesting that people opposing the project were preventing that train, and with DB being 100% owned by the German government, i would think there is a real case for demanding they actually run the train or make Merkel apologize for selling the project on a false premise.

I remember informational displays in Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof from 10 years ago; apparently it's now scheduled for completion in 2023.

Merkel's mention of Paris to Prague could be considered alliterative advertising; Mannheim to Munich might have mitigated the assumption that she was referring to a night train. However, consider that Stuttgart is on the Magistrale from Paris to Budapest, one of seven high-speed rail corridors in the Trans-European network. Completed and planned improvements including LGV Est will shave 5 hours off the route (roughly 10:30 compared to 15:30 before 2007), making a night train even less necessary than when the EuroNight Orient Express was truncated in 2001 and 2007 and discontinued in 2009. Stuttgart 21 appears to contribute about half an hour of this.

 

[Anderson]

I am sure Merkel's utterances about trains is so far down in the list of concerns of people, considering the whole refugee issue and since trains are associated with transportation of aliens, it is a safe bet that in the current environment, hardly anyone will be in a mood to call for Merkel to apologize or feel particularly enthusiastic to run a night train from Prague to France through Germany at night. At least that is what most of my German friends tell me when I ask them about it. I spend about 10 hours in teleconferences each week with folks who live around Stuttgart and work in Beoblingen. Merkel would actually be lucky to retain her position if an election were held today. All sad but very true AFAICT.

If the election were held today, a lot of people would be very surprised. Jokes aside, she'd likely hold on due to the nature of the PR situation in Germany right now: The CDU/CSU-SPD coalition is still (barely) above 50% in all polls (ranging from about 51-57% for the most part). Now, her party might decide to throw her out the window ASAP after that result, but it's not like there's an opposition coalition in a position to depose those two (you'd basically have to shove the SPD, Left, Greens, and FDP together to try and make something work, and even then it would be tight and trying to get the FDP and Left into a government would be something of an ideological "clown car" situation). And you'd need all of them onboard since even if they wouldn't coopeate, the CDU/CSU and AfD would likely have more votes than all but the FDP in that list (and convincing either the largest party in the Bundestag or the nobody-will-play-with-you party in the Bundestag to "tolerate" the government and not vote against them would be an interesting exercise).

I will say that IMHO a 10:30 train ride is a good length for an overnight trip (it falls in that 8-14 hour range that lets a trip happen without infringing upon most business hours while also taking long enough to make the overnight trip worthwhile). This isn't far off the case I've made for a NYP-timed train from parts of Virginia to New York: The ride is long enough (8-9 hours for NFK/ROA-NYP even with some improvements and removing the engine swap) and a bunch of airports don't have direct flights (e.g. PHF-NYC requires a connection; on DL, that connection is in ATL) and it is a significant pair.

 

[Just-Thinking-51]

DB is thinking about restarting some Night Trains. The talk is about DB working with OOB NightJet.

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/germanrailfr/nightjet-t6701.html

Page 2 is current, however the link to the latest story is in Germany.

 

[Thogo]

There is also an interesting sleeper train that runs just once per week: the Paris-Moscow express. It leaves Paris around 7 pm on Thursdays, arriving in Moscow Saturday around noon. Back on Tuesday around 7 pm, arriving in Paris Thursday morning. It crosses Germany, and stops in various cities (and it's AFAIK the only train with which you can go from Frankfurt/Oder to Frankfurt/Main without changing trains ).

 

[Seaboard92]

Actually there are three direct trains a week from Berlin to Mockba. The one Thogo is referring to is a direct descendent to the Ost-West Express and a partial descendent of the Nord Express of the Compaigne red Wagon Lits whom also ran the Orient Express.

The train running from Paris once a week takes 26 hours and 19 minutes to make the run from Berlin to Mockba.

While the other two trains a week take 22 hours and 44 minutes.

The reason for the difference is because the Berlin-Mockba trains are using a Talgo built sleeper train which are able to change gauge without changing out trucks in Belarus. Which significantly helps the run time.