Great to see how the Swedish Trafikverket are thinking. In an earlier post I pointed out the problems with coming by rail from Sweden to the UK or even other parts of Europe: that you need to either overnight in Hamburg in a hotel or train-jump through the night in Germany to get to Paris/Brussels and then on by Eurostar. Either way it takes a long time. Or you get a night with little sleep.
Soon no more.
Rail passengers could be leaving Sweden after dinner and arriving in London the next morning, under new plans shown in red in the diagram above.
Trafikverket, Sweden’s rail infrastructure manager, says overnight sleeper trains should run from Malmö in the country’s south to the German city of Cologne – with onward connections to other European countries.
Under a proposed timetable unveiled by the Trafikverket, the train would leave Malmö at 7.40pm, pick up passengers in Copenhagen at 8.40pm, and then arrive in Cologne for 6am after a night’s sleep.
Already-existing connections would get passengers to London at 11.57am, in time for a lunch meeting. Other connections include Amsterdam by 9.28 am, Munich by 11.08am and Paris by 10.05am.
The sleeper solves the problem of hotel or trains through the night and makes train travel to London a much more appealing alternative to flying.
Stephen Hinton Consulting 