The Swedish government announced Sunday that it will fund the creation of overnight train services from Sweden to the European mainland. According to a statement from the Social Democrat-Green coalition government, the state will pump 50 million Kronor ($5.3 million) into creating night links by train to major European destinations, as part of a drive to give Swedes more low-carbon ways to travel long distances. [...]
The new funding will be used to research which routes would be most in demand, and to find companies able to run the service. This could possibly mean side-stepping the national rail company SJ (Statens Järnvägar), which currently runs one international night service (from Stockholm to Narvik, Norway) but recently said it would wait a decade before introducing night services to the European mainland. That delay would be in order to wait for the construction of an 11-mile-long rail tunnel between Denmark and Germany called the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link, which would reduce the journey time by train from Copenhagen to Hamburg from five hours to just two.[...]
While changes in the travel industry have tended to pressure night trains off the market, it’s clear that there is still some appetite for them among travelers. When Germany’s Deutsche Bahn halted its night services in 2017, Austrian Federal Railways took over some of the key routes. The takeover has proved to be a success, with passenger numbers on the services (whose conditions are outlined here) rising from 1.4 million to 1.6 million between 2017 and 2018, a rise in profits, and talk of expansion. Meanwhile, well-established leisure services such as the London-to-Scotland Caledonian Sleeper continue to thrive.
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