Off the Rails: Why New Train Route News Is Often Misleading

News about a new train route that is about to start often sparks excitement in the railway community, but many headlines are based on speculation rather than confirmed developments, leaving readers misled about what is truly on track.

Misleading train route news headlines

Announcements about new train routes — whether they come as press releases from rail companies or appear as headlines in major newspapers — frequently appear in the news or on social media.

Obviously, this generates a great deal of excitement among avid rail travellers and those in the train community, as well as among people living near the starting point or destination of a new route.

However, many of these headlines about new train routes can be misleading, which may leave you disappointed when you look at the reality of these “soon-to-be-started” routes, some of which may take years to begin or might never happen at all!

New train routes that didn’t materialise

There are numerous examples of past news headlines about new train routes that never materialised.

Take for example the plans of the start-up rail company Midnight Trains, which promised to launch a luxury night train service between Edinburgh and Paris.

Many newspapers across the UK and France picked up their press release and rewrote it with rather sensationalist headlines, such as Edinburgh Live’s headline: “New luxury Edinburgh to Paris train will have private cabins and a cocktail bar.”

While many rail experts were rightfully sceptical about these plans from the start, raising valid concerns about their realism given the numerous challenges with Channel Tunnel access (and higher safety standards for carriages), as well as the complexities of processing passport control, a lot of ordinary people genuinely believed that an Edinburgh to Paris night train would be launched soon.

So what is the status of these plans?

Unsurprisingly, the plans for an Edinburgh-Paris sleeper train went nowhere, and the start-up rail company Midnight Trains was even folded before ever launching a train service.

Again, this hardly came as a surprise to rail experts, who were always sceptical about Midnight Trains, as their ambitious plans for luxury sleeper trains from France to the UK and Italy never aligned with reality, especially since the company never even managed to acquire any sleeper carriages, let alone file a request with the relevant rail authorities for a path for a new train service.

Anyone with a bit of knowledge could have told you that acquiring second-hand sleeper carriages is extremely difficult due to their limited availability, while ordering brand-new carriages is generally considered too expensive for a start-up, as they lack the cash flow and company size to place a large enough order to reduce the cost per carriage.

Future plans for new routes: Night trains to Portugal

The Midnight Trains fiasco serves as a good lesson in why you should always be sceptical when reading announcements of new train routes, especially when they involve start-up companies that haven’t yet launched a single train.

Lately, there have been a couple more big news headlines about new rail routes set to start, and while there is some truth in some of them, there are important caveats that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Take for example this news headline from Portugal with the title “Portugal and Spain set to restore iconic night train services”.

If you were to believe the news article, you might think that the ‘Lusitania’ night train between Madrid and Lisbon, as well as the famous ‘Sud Express’ from the Franco-Spanish border station of Hendaye to Lisbon, were set to return in 2025.

Both of these trains were sadly suspended in 2020, and since then, rail travellers and advocacy groups have campaigned to the Portuguese and Spanish governments, as well as railway companies, to have them reinstated.

Are these trains now coming back? Perhaps, but it’s still far from certain!

What has happened is that a proposal by a Portuguese political party to relaunch these night train routes has been approved by parliament, prompting the national government to begin negotiations with their Spanish counterparts to reactivate these services.

It’s a step in the right direction, but that doesn’t necessarily mean these trains will relaunch in 2025!

Without the Spanish government on board — who have been extremely sceptical about these plans in the past, with Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente stating last year that these services won’t be reinstated as they were loss-making — plans to relaunch the Sud Express and Lusitania will go nowhere.

Personally, I’d rate the chances of either of these night trains starting in 2025 at less than 10%.

New international train routes from the Netherlands

Another recent headline in the British press, as well as on major rail industry websites, talks about a new Dutch railway company called GoVolta, which will launch low-cost day trains linking Amsterdam to Basel, Berlin, Paris, and Copenhagen, with the first services set to start in September 2025.

GoVolta’s parent company has experience running charter trains, so they are not new to the challenges of operating a passenger train service.

Indeed, the company has applied for a passenger operating licence in the Netherlands and Germany and has arranged stabling and train maintenance facilities.

However, they have announced these plans before, initially stating they would start operating from the 1st of May 2024 (spoiler alert: that didn’t happen).

Their homepage still features a static image with the announcement “more information coming soon”.

Although these new train routes will hopefully start in the future, I wouldn’t automatically assume they will launch in September 2025, as we’ve already seen that setbacks are all too common in the rail sector.

Only when all licences have been approved, paths allocated, and a firm timetable established can we say for sure that these new train routes will start.

Conclusion

It’s always exciting to read about a new train route set to start in the news, although such headlines are often somewhat sensational, leaving out many important caveats.

You should always scrutinise newspaper headlines about new train route announcements and ask yourself whether such plans are realistic, as all too often they are silently scrapped a few months later, or postponed for a few years due to operational or licensing issues.