Paris and Berlin are to get a new high-speed rail service, linking the two capitals in just seven hours.
The present service takes at least two hours longer and requires passengers to change trains at least once.
The service will connect the Gare de l’Est in Paris to Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof 700 miles away via Frankfurt, aboard German ICE high-speed trains.
Line improvements in Germany should cut the time further in 2025. “We are going to take a chance and launch this train,” said SNCF chief Jean-Pierre Farandou. “It makes sense because we have noticed that people are accepting longer and longer journeys. There are people who are ready to stay five, six, seven hours in a train.”
The express will come after the relaunch next year of a Paris-Berlin night service, part of a renaissance of continent-wide sleeper trains, which almost died out with the rise of cheap air travel in the 1990s. A Paris-Nice service opened this year and Germany is working on plans for a network of 40 sleeper services extending as far as Edinburgh and Glasgow.
