Switzerland and Italy will halt all cross-border rail service from Thursday because train personnel do not have capacity to carry out COVID-19 safety checks ordered by the Italian government, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) said on Tuesday.
How Europe s night trains came back from the dead
By
Julia Buckley, CNN
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(CNN) Going to bed in one major city and waking up in another; toasting the landscape as a new country slips past; being rocked to sleep as you rattle across a continent. It s no wonder that the night trains of Europe have been a byword for romance, immortalized by writers such as Agatha Christie.
Until recently, however, the reality has been very different. In fact, over the past decade, much of Europe s night train network has been cut.
2013 and 2014 saw the culling of lines from Paris to Madrid, Rome and Barcelona; Amsterdam to Prague and Warsaw; and Berlin to Paris and Kiev.
The state also had two overnight rail services in the past, the Lark and The Spirit of California, which ceased running in 1983 because of budget cutbacks. Currently, it has only one direct train between Oakland and Los Angeles: the Coast Starlight. That train has compartments with beds, but it runs during the day. It takes about 11 hours, so it’s useless except for the most leisurely of travelers. But the schedule could be changed to turn it into an overnight run, allowing passengers to sleep through the journey.
The California Zephyr–one of several Amtrak trains with sleeper cars that spends nights in California doing nothing. Photo: Amtrak
By Reuters Staff
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ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland and Italy will halt all cross-border rail service from Thursday because train personnel do not have capacity to carry out COVID-19 safety checks ordered by the Italian government, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) said on Tuesday.
The move, in place indefinitely, affects dozens of daily routes, including long-distance trains between Milan and Frankfurt, Germany, as well as regional trains that connect the two countries, where many workers travel daily across the border from northern Italy to Switzerland.
Switzerland and neighbouring Italy, Germany and France had reduced train service in November, but rising cases during the second wave of infections that prompted the Italian government’s new requirements mean train service will be stopped much like it was during the pandemic’s first wave.
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