The rail competitor Flixtrain wants to run again from next week. The company is adding further long-distance routes to its network and will also be heading to Munich from June, as announced on Tuesday. “We want to set up a Germany-wide alternative offer, all metropolitan areas are now connected,” said Flixmobility boss André Schwämmlein. Compared to the state-owned Deutsche Bahn, the offer is still small: With nine green trains, Flixtrain alone competes against more than 300 ICE trains.
For the first time, the green trains will also stop in Bremen from May 20 and offer connections to Cologne and Hamburg. Originally, Bremen was to be included in the timetable as a stop in December last year, but due to the Corona contact restrictions, the connections were discontinued shortly before. A trip to Cologne with intermediate stops in Osnabrück, Münster, Gelsenkirchen, Essen, Duisburg and Düsseldorf starts at 9.99 euros, a trip to Hamburg costs three euros.
From May 27th, Flixtrain will travel up to eight times a day between Leipzig, Berlin and Hamburg. Since winter, Deutsche Bahn’s ICE has been running between the two largest German cities every half an hour on average during the day. “We fit into the half-hourly cycle,” said Schwämmlein, who sees his trains there at eye level with the ICE even during travel times.
For the first time, the trains also run to and from Munich. A night connection between Munich, Berlin and Hamburg will be offered from June 17, but no sleeping or couchette cars are planned. A day later, a day connection between the Bavarian capital and Frankfurt via Augsburg and Aschaffenburg starts.
Flixtrain is the railway brand of the Flixmobility company, which is best known for the long-distance bus brand Flixbus. The trains have been at a standstill since November due to the corona pandemic. Operations on the Hamburg-Cologne and Berlin-Cologne routes are scheduled to start again on May 20, with Berlin-Stuttgart to follow in June.
A total of around 40 cities are then on the timetable – that’s about as many as with Flixbus. Before the pandemic, the green buses drove to ten times as many cities. As with buses, Flixmobility does not buy its own vehicles for trains, but rather restricts itself to network planning and marketing. Partner companies operate the trains.
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