GreenCityTrip turns attention to Eastern Europe with night train Amsterdam-Prague
GreenCityTrip will launch a night train service between Amsterdam and Prague from April 21 onwards, the company announced on Tuesday. The operator will run a maximum of three trains per week, which also call at Dresden. Going forward, GreenCityTrip will be eyeing more destinations in Eastern Europe.
GreenCityTrip offers 5-day retour train trips with hotels included, though it is also possible to book a retour ticket only. Passengers travel back with the same train as the outward journey. The train on the Amsterdam-Prague route will comprise 16 carriages for a total of 720 passengers. The number of fully fledged sleeper carriages has been increased to four. Departure time from Amsterdam is at 19:32 in the evening. The planned arrival times in Dresden and Prague are at 07:49 and 10:30 in the morning, respectively. According to GreenCityTrip co-owner Maarten Bastian, the train will probably arrive in Prague ahead of schedule, but due to the many track works in Germany a bit of a buffer was baked into the timetable.
Those same track works resulted in European Sleeper announcing a few months ago that it had not been allocated track capacity south of Dresden for this year. This meant that the company had to cut its service short to Berlin instead. That night train service will kick off on May 25.
‘First year as a pilot’
GreenCityTrip in September celebrated its first year of activities with the addition of Budapest to its list of destinations. At the time, the operator offered no less than 10 destinations. “This was a bit of a pilot period, in hindsight”, Bastian told Dutch sister publication SpoorPro. “Trains to Italy in particular suffered in terms of punctuality, which reflected badly on the service in general. Better experiences to destination in Eastern Europe showed us that there might be more potential there”.
According to Bastian, hotels are also more reasonably priced in cities such as Dresden and Prague. “In times of high inflation, these difference matter”. For this reason, the company is eying additional destination in Eastern Europe, Bastian revealed, without going into much detail.
This article was first published on SpoorPro.nl.
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