The head of the company behind the journey said ‘the Italians began to change their minds’ on allowing the train into the country.
The maiden voyage of a night train from Brussels to Venice didn’t make it to its final destination yesterday due to issues at the Italian border.
Instead, the train stopped in Innsbruck in Austria, 313km short of its destination, and passengers were moved onto a different train to complete their journey to Venice.
Train operator European Sleeper had called the route a “significant milestone” for the company, saying their “mission is to reconnect Europe’s cities by night, providing travellers with more options for sustainable and comfortable.”
Innsbruck was intended to be a “prominent stop” rather than the train’s final destination.
‘It seemed that everything was settled’
Elmer van Buuren, one of the two founders of the Dutch private railway company European Sleeper told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, that the Italian railways gave them little notice:
“It took nine months, hundreds of phone calls and meetings to start this project. We have set separate appointments with five services similar to ProRail, in each country crossed. It seemed that everything was settled, when, last week, the Italians began to change their minds and called us to tell us that we could not go beyond Bolzano.
Now it turned out that we couldn’t even enter Italy. They did not provide any reason. It is a typical phenomenon especially of the railways in Europe.”
Why was the European Sleeper train stopped at the Italian border?
Train travel expert Mark Smith, who runs the website the Man in Seat 61, was on the train.
He reports that the locomotive engines needed to escort the train into Venice were not available. He says European Sleeper were only informed of the engine issue on 4 February, the day before the train left Brussels.
“The train was due to terminate in Verona as two locomotives are needed to ‘top and tail’ the train in and out of Venice, as the Italian network no longer allows light engine movements around Venice. They couldn’t get two for this departure, should be solved for later ones,” Mark Smith wrote on X.
“They then got a phone call day before yesterday from their Italian operator, unable to take the train south of Innsbruck. Again, ES [European Sleeper] hope to fix this for later departures. It’s not easy, running a train across 5 countries!”
The train had travelled from Brussels in Belgium to Breda and Eindhoven in the Netherlands before moving on to Cologne and Munich in Germany.
What is the advice to passengers booked on the Brussels-Venice night train?
There are currently Brussels-Venice night trains scheduled throughout February and March.
The service is scheduled to run twice weekly for six return journeys, with the company saying, “This unique route caters to travellers seeking winter sports getaways, city breaks, cultural experiences, and the world-renowned Venice Carnival.”
At the time of writing, it is not clear if European Sleeper can ensure that the locomotive engines needed to transport their train within Italy will be available.
European Sleeper and the Italian Ministry of Transport did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Cross-border train travel in Europe is tricky
Some are seeing the night train’s shortened route as reflective of wider issues with European cross-border train travel.
It has historically been difficult for authorities and train operators to coordinate their services to allow trains to pass seamlessly over borders, as flights do. This is seen as a barrier to travellers opting for trains over planes, despite them being much better for the climate.
A report by the European Commission found that the total number of long-distance passenger cross-border services in the EU remained the same from 2001 to 2019, and overall they make up only about seven per cent of train journeys in Europe.
To help boost these numbers, Victor Thévenet, rail policy manager at sustainable mobility NGO Transport and Environment, says that planning a train journey needs to be much simpler.
“People need to be able to combine different rail operators and for this, you need to have your different tickets in one single ticket,” he tells Euronews Travel.
Buying train tickets in Europe can be complicated but the EU has a solution
There is currently no Skyscanner equivalent for trains. This makes booking and managing international train journeys difficult and often more expensive.
The EU has a plan to remedy the situation in the form of the Multimodal Digital Mobility Services legislation. It was delayed last year but it is hoped it will be given another chance this year.
It would create a platform where you could buy one ticket for an entire cross-border journey instead of having to go through multiple national operators separately and give passengers stronger rights if they were to miss a connecting train.
