Railways and night-sleepers back in fashion in Europe

German Rail, Deutsche Bahn is owned by the German State and operates over 33,000 km of track. Signalling and track is also in State ownership.

In 2018 it carried 2.58 billion passengers, with a turnover of €44.5 billion.

Over the last 30 years German Rail operates an ICE service between all German cities. The fastest of these trains travels at 320km/h.

With the introduction of high-speed ICEs, German Rail gradually discontinued its night-sleeper trains.

But night-sleepers are returning to fashion and Austrian Railways are reintroducing them to their network.

People are changing their lifestyles. Instead of  thinking everything could get faster and cheaper now  there is the awareness that we are in trouble because everything gets too fast and too cheap.

At present German Rail's ICEs connect cities on an hourly basis. With the arrival of a new generation of ICEs the plan is to reduce that time to 30 minute intervals. It means there will be no need to check timetables. Just turn up at the station and hop on to your train whether you are going from Berlin to Dresden or Munich to Hamburg.

With the unification of Germany the railway company changed its name from German Federal Rail to German Rail. In German it went from Deutsche Bundesbahn to Deutsche Bahn. But it meant the logo stayed the same - DB

Before the war the railway company was known as German Kingdom Railways, Deutsche Reichsbahn - DR. After the war and the division of Germany, East Germany retained the old railway name with the logo DR. Ironic that a Communist state would include the word 'kingdom' on the name of its railway.

The East German authorities retained the German Kingdom Rail in an effort to maintain the link between the old Germany and the new GDR. As if to say the new GDR was the legitimate successor to the German State.

It would be interesting to compare the railway system in Germany with that in the UK.