Düsseldorf. Austrian Railways is pulling the emergency brake: Because routes are overloaded, the night train to Vienna and Innsbruck no longer runs through the Rhineland.
From mid-December, the much-used night train connection to Vienna and Innsbruck for Arnhem, Düsseldorf and Cologne will be history: From December, the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) will no longer send their night train from Amsterdam to Austria and back via the right-bank route via Arnhem/Emmerich. In future, the train will cross the border at the Bad Bentheim border crossing in Münsterland.
Often more than an hour late
ÖBB spokesman Bernhard Riedel admitted to the Dutch rail customer portal “Treinreiziger” (roughly: “passenger”) that this year more than 15 percent of night trains have reached Vienna more than an hour late, and at some stations along the way, one in three night trains was more than an hour late.
This is due to bottlenecks in both the Dutch and German rail networks. Passengers in Düsseldorf often had to wait a long time on the platform before the night train arrived late – a rather dubious pleasure at 9:15 p.m.
70-kilometer-long permanent construction site: The Oberhausen-Wesel-Emmerich railway line is being expanded to three tracks, bit by bit. © FUNKE Foto Services | Erwin Pottgiesser
The new route is to be operated from the timetable change on December 15, 2024. The concept will probably even take effect from the beginning of November, because that is when the 80-week, largely complete closure of the Oberhausen-Emmerich railway line begins, which is to be largely expanded into a so-called high-performance corridor by the end of May 2026.
Bad news for winter sports enthusiasts
It is not clear whether the night train, which initially runs from Utrecht via Deventer and probably continues towards Hanover and then south, will ever return to the Rhineland. This is particularly bad news for winter sports fans who, like last winter, wanted to travel from Düsseldorf to Innsbruck and Tyrol during the Christmas holidays. Regardless of this, numerous other providers want to use the overcrowded route between Amsterdam and the Rhineland.
Because of the all too frequent delays, the Swiss railway company had already decided to only allow trains from Germany into the country if they were reasonably on schedule. A few weeks ago, Greenpeace published a study explaining why the railways in Europe are not succeeding in becoming a viable alternative to airplanes or cars. For several years, the Austrian railways have been investing heavily in night train services, which are being expanded throughout Europe, with the exception of the Rhineland.
