It’s a great time to be a train nerd. There are plans to connect every major city on the continent with a high-speed rail network, the iconic Orient Express is making a comeback, and new sleeper train routes are popping up all the time.
Earlier this month, plans for overnight trains between Barcelona, Milan, and Brussels were announced, but the very latest news is the launch of a connection between Switzerland and Scandinavia.
Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) is about to release the first batch of tickets for a brand new sleeper service between Basel, Copenhagen, and the Swedish city of Malmö. Trains will run three times a week, and become the first direct rail connection between the Scandinavian nations and Switzerland.
This is being backed by the Swiss government, which says that it is glad to see SBB ‘expanding its international services and making climate-friendly travel to Northern Europe even more accessible’, and adds that the introduction of the link ‘meets the growing demand for sustainable, cross-border mobility’.
Each train will have space for 350 people across beds and seats. Although the seated tickets will be cheaper, this is a pretty long journey, so it’s probably worth investing in that full-sized bed and hunkering down for the trip. Trains will leave Basel at 5.35pm every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, and won’t arrive at their final destination (Malmö) until 9.35am the next day. That’s a total of 16 hours – far too many to not be sitting vertically the whole time.
Return trips from Malmö to Basel will run on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Mondays, departing just before 7pm and pulling into the Swiss station at 11.30am having traversed more than 1,400km. Other stops will include Frankfurt (Main) Süd, Hamburg, Odense, Copenhagen Airport, and more.
The service will begin on April 15 2026, and tickets will go on sale from next week – on November 4. You’ll be able to purchase them on the SBB website here, or the app – all that’s needed now is parliamentary approval.
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