Currently, if you want to get between the southern German city of Munich and the northern Italian city of Milan, the rail route isn’t exactly hassle-free. Not only is there no direct train but it takes a really, really long time. At over seven hours, the rail route takes even longer than it would to get between the two cities by car – usually less than a six-hour journey.
But that if officially changing. A joint project from two national rail operators, Italy’s Trenitalia and Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, has announced a new direct cross-border Munich-Milan train route. And that isn’t all: a direct train from Munich to the Italian capital Rome is also on the cards.
The operators signed a preliminary deal at the end of 2023, and the two new routes are set to launch in 2026. The project has the support of the European Commission and could even eventually be extended all the way up from Munich to Berlin – thereby providing a rail line across much of the European continent. While the services are due to operate a conventional speed at first, but improvements to the lines will allow for speedier services in the future.
The Rome-Munich route will stop at Florence, Bologna, Verona, Rovereto, Trento, Bolzano, Brenner and Innsbruck. The Milan-Munich route, meanwhile, is scheduled to stop at Brescia, Verona, Bolzano, Brenner and Innsbruck.
Which is all pretty exciting, eh? Several of Europe’s biggest and best cities will soon have direct train links. And that certainly isn’t the only European rail project in the pipeline. With the abundance of new high-speed routes to all these new sleeper train routes, Europe’s rail renaissance continues to go from strength to strength.
Did you see that you can now book a luxury train from Paris to Portofino?
Plus: these two European capitals just got a brand-new direct train link.
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