Launched earlier this year, with its first journey taking place in late March, the sleeper train that connects Brussels and Prague provides multiple people the needed means to travel directly from Brussels to Prague with the possibility to stop in other major cities such as the Hague, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Dresden. Furthermore, the train allows passengers to travel three times per week in each direction.
Now, six months later, scheduling issues, along with railway work and ineffective communication between Germany and its neighbouring countries, have cast doubts over the future of the night train. The most pressing issue being the fact that European Sleeper, the Belgian-Dutch railway operator of the service, has still not received the necessary data from Germany to develop the timetable for the Brussels-Prague train next year.
The information is only expected to be submitted before the annual change of timetables. However, if the data is received too late, the operator will not have enough time to create next year’s schedule, meaning the service will have to be axed, leaving passengers searching for other means of transportation between the Belgian and Czech capitals.
“Due to a lack of investment, work on the railway is severely backlogged,” said European Sleeper co-founder and CEO Elmer van Buuren. “The growing difficulties in finding timetable capacity, combined with the lack of coordination make adding even a single train to the network very challenging.”
This is not the first time European Sleeper trains have encountered challenges. Earlier this month, the launch of the night train from the Netherlands to Spain had to be postponed to 2026 because of bureaucratic complications in France. Originally, the train was planned to start travelling between Amsterdam and Barcelona, with stops in Brussels and Lille, in 2025.
On the bright side, from 2025 the operator will have another train running, connecting Belgium and Italy. With an easy to remember launch date, the inaugural train will depart Brussels at 5:00 pm on Wednesday, 5 February 2025. It will head north first of all, stopping in the Dutch cities of Rotterdam and Utrecht, before turning east towards Cologne, south to Munich in Germany, then visiting Innsbruck in Austria, and two further stops in Italy, the southern Tyrolean town of Bolzano, as well as Verona, before reaching its terminus, famous lagoon city, just after lunch at 2:00 pm the following day.
