germany

GoVolta has sent a request to ACM this week for some more(!) plans for international trains. This includes: - (a) The Hague to Luxembourg and Strasbourg via Rotterdam and Brussel-Zuid. On Monday-Friday the morning trains runs to Strasbourg, and the afternoon only to Luxembourg. The weekends only run to Luxembourg. This is scheduled to begin in the 2028 timetable. - (b) The Hague to Cologne via Rotterdam, Utrecht and Arnhem three times a day, from Monday through Friday, and twice a day on weekends. This is scheduled to begin in the 2028 timetable. - (c) Amsterdam to Paris on the high-speed line, three times a day, seven days a week, scheduled to begin in the 2029 timetable. This will be in addition to their currently planned service that will run on the conventional rail network starting this December.

Services (a) and (b) are said to run on loco-hauled carriages or EMU, but for the high-speed service (c) Winkelman has told Treinreiziger.nl that they are looking at old ICE 3M trains.

Reports from Martijn van Vulpen and mobilithib both confirm that GoVolta will be suspending their Amsterdam to Hamburg service in June. It seems the carriages will be used on the much more popular Amsterdam-Berlin route, upping the frequency from three to six trips per week. It's also expected that the train service will switch to buses soon until the suspension in June.

I actually believed this would be GoVolta's major differentiator, given there are currently no direct trains from Amsterdam to Hamburg. Also, this service could have been extended in the future to meet their ambitions to connect with Copenhagen.

European Sleeper launched their Paris - Brussels - Berlin night service on 26 March. This is an addition to their existing Brussels - Amsterdam - Berlin -Prague service, which started in May 2023. Thibault Lapers coverage, as always, is extensive, so that's why I'll choose to share that here while adding some of my notes below.

This inaugural trip comes as ÖBB scraps their Nightjet connection between Paris and Berlin, and Paris and Vienna after SNCF stopped subsidising the services starting in 2026. On LinkedIn, Jon Worth uploaded a video of European Sleeper's first departure on their new connection, saying:

ÖBB and SNCF ended the Paris-Berlin night train, saying it was impossible to run it without a subsidy. So private company European Sleeper stepped in instead. The first train departed Paris Nord this evening, and the service will operate 3x a week. Excellent work Elmer van Buuren and team!

The video shows RailPool's Alstom TRAXX MS3 Universal locomotive, number 188 144, departing Paris, to much celebration, pulling eight RDC passenger carriages (a mix of sleepers and couchettes) with stickers from European Sleerp and Train Charter.

Railcolor reports that European Sleeper also leases RailPool's 188 121 locomotive.

Earlier today GoVolta's first passenger service departed Amsterdam Centraal from platform 8 at 08:34. Since I've moved out of the Netherlands, I couldn’t film the inaugural trip. Fortunately, as always, Dylan's Depot is quick with their videos and had one out a few hours after the train left.

In the video we see 8 ex-NMBS I10 carriages being pulled by TrainCharter Service's Alsthom 1700, number 101001. The class 1700's were taken out of regular passenger service with the last one operated by NS in 2023. Now with the GoVolta service you can once again ride with these locomotives up until Bad Bentheim where the locomotive is swapped for a Siemens Vectron capable for running in Germany. In a video recorded by Trainspotter RRX we can see this one used today is RailPool operated Vectron, number 193 828.

As for the eight carriages, out of the presumably 13 purchased from NMBS, the exterior sports the new GoVolta livery with scenery from various cities. We were able to get a sneak-peak before the launch through LinkedIn posts by GoVolta and the CEO.From the quick view of the interior shown in the video by Dylan's Depot we can see that most of it is left unchanged from when NMBS used the carriages.