It's back. Nine years after it stopped, the Berlin-Paris night train resumed service on Monday, December 11. Departing at 8:28 pm from Berlin's main station, under the cameras and flashbulbs of German railfans. Its scheduled arrival in Paris was at 10:26 am, after a 14-hour journey, with an enthusiastic welcome from the French railway enthusiasts despite a good 15-minute delay waiting in the winter drizzle.

The Nightjet – as this night train is called – left Paris again that evening at 7:12 pm, arriving in the German capital at 8:26 am the following day. Comprising six cars, it offers a choice of three levels of comfort. Sleeper cabins (72 seats, from €94.90 if booked well in advance) are the most sought-after, with wide benches (for one to three people per cabin). They are equipped with either a bathroom (shower and WC) or a small washbasin with access to a shower in the corridor. Couchette carriages have four or six couchettes (108 seats in, total from €59.90). The cheapest option for travel is still the seating carriage, with 132 reclining seats, from €29.90.

The trip requires a little organization as there is no daily connection between the two capitals: You need to plan to leave Paris on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday evening, and to return from Berlin on Monday, Wednesday or Friday evening. The weekend will be staggered, then, if departing from Paris. If all goes well, the train will run every day from October 2024, a far less flexible option than air travel.

Nostalgia has invaded the two train stations with the return of this link. "The first time I came to Berlin was 33 years ago with my parents. They wanted to show me what was left of the Wall," said Clément Beaune, the French minister of transport, on the platform of the Hauptbahnhof, Berlin's main railway station. At Gare de l'Est in Paris, the national train operator SNCF CEO Jean-Pierre Farandou recalled "having already relaunched this train in 1991, two years after the fall of the Wall." At the time, he was director of operations for Eastern France. Regrets were also expressed: "It was a mistake to have stopped," said Manja Schreiner, Berlin's CDU senator for mobility, transport and climate protection.

Andreas Matthä, CEO of Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB), does not have any regrets. In 2016, he decided to buy the rolling stock of Deutsche Bahn, the German company that decided to discontinue night trains. Today, he's the only one with the sleeping cars and couchettes needed to revive these highly sought-after routes. "Some people smiled at our initiative, when we wanted to reverse the trend toward the end of night trains, but today they're full, booked months in advance," he said. With the Nightjet brand, ÖBB has become a must. It is this company's train that runs between Berlin and Paris. Its equipment is also used for connections between Berlin and Brussels, Vienna and Paris, and Vienna and Brussels. The Paris-Vienna service boasts a booking rate of 75%.

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