File photo taken on Jan. 20, 2019 shows a passenger train running across the Landwasser Viaduct near Filisur, Switzerland. (Photo: Xinhua)

 

File photo taken on June 17, 2020 shows Passengers at Central Train Station in Berlin, Germany.(Photo: Xinhua)

 
Transport ministers of Switzerland, Austria, France and Germany on Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding to increase cooperation on large-scale cross-border and night-train networks over the next four years.

According to a report by the swissinfo.ch, the international service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, one year later from now, night trains should be up and running on the Vienna-Munich-Paris and Zurich-Cologne-Amsterdam routes.

This will probably be followed by connections from Vienna and Berlin to Brussels and Paris by 2023, and then from Zurich to Barcelona by the end of 2024, the report said.

According to the report, the dismantling of the Swiss sleeper network began 15 years ago, and since then more and more direct overnight routes have disappeared.

However, the Swiss Federal Railways said in a statement earlier in September that demand for international night-train services "significantly increased in 2019 and at the start of 2020 until the coronavirus crisis struck."