France and Germany Are Building a Train Against the Plane

Deutsche Bahn and SNCF will launch a new high-speed service between Paris and Munich toward the end of 2026, calling at Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Augsburg. On paper it is one more city pair. In practice it is another entry in a slow, deliberate campaign to make the train the default choice on European journeys that airlines have owned for thirty years — and the intermediate stops matter, because they turn a single flagship route into a corridor serving several markets at once.

The rest of the 2026 map is unusually busy. Paris–Berlin service via Brussels resumed on 26 March, with a Hamburg stop added on 13 July. A direct Prague–Copenhagen train via Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin launched on 1 May, running year-round in daytime with a journey time of roughly eleven hours end to end. Operators hope to run up to six round trips a day between Belgrade and Budapest from March, two of them fast EuroCity services connecting onward to Vienna.

Infrastructure is what makes the timetable possible. The headline project is the full opening of Austria’s Koralmbahn, the new high-speed line linking Graz and Klagenfurt, which collapses a journey that historically involved a slow mountain detour. Overnight travel is returning too: Swiss Federal Railways hopes to launch a EuroNight service between Basel, Malmö and Copenhagen from 15 April, restoring a sleeper link between Switzerland and Scandinavia.

The practical caveat for travellers is that cross-border European rail remains fragmented at the point of sale. Cross-operator tickets are not always bookable in a single transaction, and a missed connection on separately purchased legs may leave you without protection. Book through one operator where you can, check whether your journey is covered by a through-ticket, and remember that the door-to-door comparison with flying — city centre to city centre, no security queue — is where rail wins, not the raw journey time.

Sources: CNN Travel, European Rail Timetable