One of the more ambitious routes in Europe’s growing network of overnight sleeper trains is facing delays getting started; European Sleeper says it’s having trouble getting France to make room for it to run from Amsterdam to Barcelona.
European Sleeper is a relatively new player in the boom that started when Austria’s OBB took over sleeper routes being abandoned by Germany’s DB in 2016. The growth of new routes since then has been rapid and European Sleeper has become a major player.
The company’s head, Elmer van Buuren, says he’s not accusing France of purposely obstructing his company’s plans, but does say “it is not easy to get a place in the timetable there,” and might result in delaying the start of service by a year or more. He points out that the French rail infrastructure is undergoing a lot of renovation and “that kind of work is mainly done at night. And we run night trains. So then you collide in terms of priorities.”
Another issue for starting new routes is rolling stock. Before 2016, little new investment went into sleeping cars, and the ones OBB bought from DB were older cars that were then renovated. As OBB’s new trains come on line from builders, the older cars are used either for expansion, or can be sold to other operators.
UPDATE
Another cross-border rail project is also being held up by ‘administrative delays’ in France, a planned direct high-speed train from Barcelona to Paris, to be operated by Spain’s RENFE.
Originally scheduled to start in July, in time for the Paris Summer Olympics, it will now (hopefully) start before the end of the year.
Some skeptics suspect that France’s state-owned SNCF, which is both the national rail operator and manages the rail infrastructure is in no hurry to approve competing projects, but none of the companies involved has, so far, lodged an EU competition complaint