Launch date announced for Prague-Brussels sleeper train

Prague and Brussels will be directly connected via a sleeper train starting in 2024, start-up European Sleeper recently announced. The Prague-Brussels route is an extension Brussels-Berlin night train that has recently been launched – over 10,000 tickets have already been sold for that new service, which runs thrice per week.

The new route connecting Belgium with Czechia is expected to take about 15 hours and stop at Antwerp, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Dresden before arriving in Prague.

Owing to the Eurostar connection at Brussels, it also opens up the possibility of travelers being able to get all the way from London to Prague (and vice versa) using just two trains.

The route was announced in 2021 in cooperation with Czech carrier RegioJet. Two years ago, the train from Prague was planned to arrive in Brussels in the morning, in time for meetings of European institutions. In the reverse direction, it would leave Brussels in the evening and arrive in Prague in the morning. However, no official schedule has yet been published.

Travelers this summer have a range of opportunities to reach European destinations via newly launched long-distance trains. For example, a sleeper train operating from Prague to the Swiss city of Zürich is currently in operation. It also travels through Dresden, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Basel.

Sleeper services will also launch this summer from Bohumín in the east of Czechia to the Polish coastal city of Gdańsk. Summer night trains with sleeping carriages have also connected Prague with Croatian destinations (such as Split, Rijeka, or Ogulin) in the past, and will continue to do so this summer. The popular Budapest is also reachable via sleeper train, as is the Slovak city of Košice.

Inter-European train travel, including sleeper services, has been expanding in recent decades. Budding travelers in Prague can also take a night train from nearby Vienna to Venice and Rome, and travel from Berlin to Stockholm via a sleeper train.

The emergence of the Prague-Brussels route will come as welcome news to keen travelers in Europe, and is also indicative of EU-wide aims to expand Europe’s current cross-border transport system, the Trans-European Transport Network.