Paul Winkler, engineer at Siemens AG, discusses blueprint designs of a new sleeper train at the Siemens AG railway plant in Vienna, Austria, on Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2019. With environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s “flight shaming” making people more aware of their carbon footprint, the night-train industry is seeing a renaissance. Photographer: AKOS STILLER / BLOOMBERGFrom Russia With Love
That’s heartening news for Siemens engineer Paul Winkler, who’s been building trains for 27 years and believed he’d never again make another sleeper train car for Western Europe. On December 16, Siemens will start making 13 new night trains for OeBB at its factory in Vienna’s Simmering district, where trains have been made since the Habsburg Empire’s 19th-century railway boom. Carriages that will give sleeper cars their first major design overhaul in six decades will be ready for testing by late 2020. The Austrian state rail company’s order is Siemens’s first and only such contract from a Western European rail company in the past 15 years.
Its night-train passenger numbers are set for a 10% gain in 2019. Some links, such as Vienna-Zurich, have grown more than 20%. The company has revived its Vienna-Venice link. In January, it’s starting a Vienna-Brussels connection for travellers to the EU’s de facto capital, a move Social Democrat legislator Andreas Schieder welcomed in a tweet. Four German legislators are now clamouring for a Berlin-Brussels link, which OeBB could serve in co-operation with Deutsche Bahn.