The new railway company Midnight Trains wants to launch top-of-the-range night trains as a priority on Paris-Venice, Paris-Nice and Paris-Barcelona.
The new railway company Midnight Trains wants to launch high-end night trains as a priority on Paris-Venice, Paris-Nice and Paris-Barcelona, according to notices published Monday by the Transport Regulatory Authority (ART). “That means that these are the destinations on which we work the most, with a downside to Nice since we prioritize European destinations”explained to AFP the co-founder of the company, Adrien Aumont.
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Declarations to ART, which must be made at least eighteen months in advance, “are part of the logical development path”and do not indicate formal launch dates, he said. “The real subject is rolling stock” that the company is seeking to obtain, he pointed out, promising “announcements soon”. Midnight Trains has said it wants to start its service from June 1, 2024 with a daily round trip between Paris and Venice in fourteen hours, via Dijon, Milan, Brescia, Verona, Padua and Mestre.
“Hotels on rails”
This relationship was suspended by the Italian company Trenitalia at the start of the health crisis in March 2020 and since abandoned. The company then wants to launch night services Paris-Nice via Dijon, Marseille-Blancarde, Toulon, Les Arcs, Saint-Raphaël, Cannes and Antibes, and Paris-Barcelona via Dijon, Perpignan, Figueras and Girona. These two daily connections would be – according to the declarations to ART – launched on December 15, 2024, with a common routing on part of the route. The SNCF relaunched the Paris-Nice night train in May 2021, and the government – which subsidizes it – is planning a Paris-Barcelona by 2030, according to a roadmap made public in December.
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Midnight Trains wants to run “hotels on rails” between Paris and major European cities, located 800 to 1,500 km beyond the zone of relevance for high-speed trains. The “first French railway start-up” is financed by French entrepreneurs including the boss of Free Xavier Niel and the co-founders of the crowdfunding platform KissKissBankBank, of which Adrien Aumont is a part. “The key point of our positioning is to only provide private beds”with rooms where passengers will not sleep with strangers, he said in June, refuting to register on the luxury niche.