Achieve your goal while you sleep: The night train principle is making a comeback - and the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) are responding to this. The state-owned railway company is expanding its international offer of overnight train services, as announced at the presentation of the new timetable.
The "success story of the ÖBB Nightjet" will be extended by a chapter, it says in a message. "As a special highlight, the ÖBB plans to record a night service between Vienna and Brussels."
- As of January 2020, a nightjet will run twice a week between Vienna and Innsbruck to Brussels , in addition to the current 26 connections, said ÖBB CEO Andreas Matthä. The booking start at the beginning of December.
- From December 2020, a night train connection between Vienna and Amsterdam is to be added.
The offer benefits from the climate discussion, says Matthä. On individual routes such as Munich-Rome, Vienna-Hamburg and Vienna-Zurich, the growth rates in the first half of 2019 would be ten percent or more. "We will not stop," said the railway manager with a view to the extension of the night train offer.
According to ÖBB, there will be more opportunities for pastime for free-time surfers and digital entertainment in future. Thanks to WLAN and a so-called on-board portal, these were standard in Railjet long-distance trains and many local trains. From 2020, the ÖBB will gradually equip the nightjets with it.
Apart from the night trains, ÖBB also wants to expand local and long-distance traffic. As of May 2020, the new long-haul connections include an offer on the route from Graz to Berlin (via Vienna and Dresden). In local transport ÖBB want to use several hundred trains in addition.
The investments in infrastructure, which have been high for years - € 2.5 billion by 2020 - have led to ÖBB being "the most punctual railway in the EU". ÖBB sends 300 long-distance trains per day by rail, more than 50 per cent of them are international long-distance carriers.
