jamesontheroad
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- 24 Jan 2009
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As per an article on Järnvägar (in Swedish) this week, Flixtrain has announced an agreement with the Swedish operator Hector Rail to drive and staff their new services in Sweden.
Having applied for train paths on both the Stockholm-Malmö and Stockholm-Gothenburg corridors, Flixtrain will now only start with the latter, with three round trips on weekdays. Flixtrain are shown in Trafikverket's "T21" schedule as starting from 3 May 2021, but this could change subject to COVID.
Most interestingly, even though Hector Rail has previously acquired a fleet of second-hand carriages for passenger services, it is now confirmed that they will use examples of carriages from the same fleet that has recently been refurbished by Talbot in Aachen for Flixtrain services in Germany.
If I've got their heritage right, they were built as BM234 and BM235 from the late nineteen-sixties until the late seventies, and then later reconfigured for DB InterRegio as mixed compartment/open carriages. Snälltåget have a fleet of similar carriages that were sold by DB to NS for before then being sold again and being refurbished in Romania for service in Sweden.
The Talbot refurbishment has squeezed as many as 100 seats into the carriages, so it will probably be the densest intercity seating in Sweden. Unusually for Sweden, however, each train will have bookable spaces for bicycles, something that SJ does not offer on intercity and long distance trains.
Flixtrain will compete against SJ and MTRX on the Stockholm-Gothenburg route.
Having applied for train paths on both the Stockholm-Malmö and Stockholm-Gothenburg corridors, Flixtrain will now only start with the latter, with three round trips on weekdays. Flixtrain are shown in Trafikverket's "T21" schedule as starting from 3 May 2021, but this could change subject to COVID.
Most interestingly, even though Hector Rail has previously acquired a fleet of second-hand carriages for passenger services, it is now confirmed that they will use examples of carriages from the same fleet that has recently been refurbished by Talbot in Aachen for Flixtrain services in Germany.
If I've got their heritage right, they were built as BM234 and BM235 from the late nineteen-sixties until the late seventies, and then later reconfigured for DB InterRegio as mixed compartment/open carriages. Snälltåget have a fleet of similar carriages that were sold by DB to NS for before then being sold again and being refurbished in Romania for service in Sweden.
The Talbot refurbishment has squeezed as many as 100 seats into the carriages, so it will probably be the densest intercity seating in Sweden. Unusually for Sweden, however, each train will have bookable spaces for bicycles, something that SJ does not offer on intercity and long distance trains.
Flixtrain will compete against SJ and MTRX on the Stockholm-Gothenburg route.
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