It will be relaunched on December 11. The Berlin-Paris night train, canceled at the end of 2014, will be active again at the end of the year. Relaunched two years after the revival of Paris-Vienne, it will stop on the way in Strasbourg and, in Germany, in Mannheim, Erfurt and Halle. “The service will start on December 11 from Berlin, three times a week, before becoming daily from October 2024,” Bernhard Rieder, spokesman for the Austrian company ÖBB, told AFP on Wednesday. make this connection.
The first night train from Paris to Berlin will leave the next day, December 12. Tickets are not yet on sale. The return of this emblematic line was announced in December 2020 by the French public railway companies SNCF, German Deutsche Bahn and Austrian ÖBB, allied alongside the Swiss CFF to relaunch cross-border night connections.
Relaunch of night trains in Europe
It fits into the slow European relaunch of night trains, a means of transport that is coming back into favor due to its low climate impact and the vogue for “slow travel”, the taste for trips where speed does not count. And in this area, the company ÖBB leads the dance with its “Nightjets”, since it bought in 2016 the night trains that Deutsche Bahn wanted to get rid of. It has invested several hundred million euros in new cars and is gradually extending its network throughout Europe, forging partnerships with the companies concerned.
The ÖBB company will reorganize its service to form a sort of large “X” by integrating the Berlin service into its existing Paris-Vienna and Brussels-Vienna night trains. The trains will therefore connect Paris or Brussels on the one hand, to Berlin or Vienna on the other. They will be recomposed in the middle of the night in Mannheim, on the banks of the Rhine.
Tickets under 50 euros
For Parisians, the departure is according to ÖBB scheduled for 7:12 p.m. from Paris-Est, for an arrival at Berlin central station the next morning at 8:26 a.m. In the other direction, departure from Berlin at 8:18 p.m., arrival the next day in Paris at 10:24 a.m. The trip will therefore last more than 13 hours in one direction, more than 14 hours in the other. The cheapest seats will, according to the German press, be offered at 34.90 euros, berths at 49.90 euros and beds at 79.90 euros.
Asked by AFP, the SNCF made no comment. Deutsche Bahn, for its part, confirmed the date, welcoming the development of its “cooperation with ÖBB in night traffic”.
Soon a Paris-Berlin day?
Separately, the SNCF and the Deutsche Bahn announced last year their desire to run a daytime Paris-Berlin, at high speed, from the end of 2024. Today, you have to change once or twice between two capitals. The future seven-hour connection will initially be operated with German ICE high-speed trains.
Its route has been the subject of much debate in recent months, the German partners favoring a more direct page through Saarbrücken, and not through Strasbourg, citing work on the network. The Minister Delegate for Transport Clement Beaune ured Friday that this link would p “gradually” through Strasbourg, but not before 2025.
Cahin-caha, many European companies are participating in the revival of night trains, which almost disappeared in the 2010s. night on the network that disrupt night traffic and the very low profitability of this type of connection, which most often cannot operate without public subsidies.