CityNightLine
former Swiss company
CityNightLine AG (timetable and platform sign abbreviation: CNL) was a Swiss night train service. CNL had right of passage grants in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark. It served stations in Belgium, France, Italy and the Czech Republic.
History
CityNightLine AG was a joint project/creation undertaken by the Deutsche Bahn (DB) (German Federal Railways), the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) and the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB-CFF-FFS). CityNightLine's first train departed on 28 May 1995. SBB-CFF-FFS and ÖBB have since ended their collaboration with CNL. As the predecessor joint CityNightLine company the new daughter company of DB is incorporated under Swiss law, based in Zurich.
CityNightLine was acquired by Deutsche Bahn AG in 2007 and merged with DB NachtZug to form the "City Night Line" which until 2016 offered night services in former CityNightLine and NachtZug territories, of which includes the majority of CityNightLine's operations at the time of the merger. At the end of 2016, CityNightLine stopped operating, carriages were sold to the Austrian Railways which extended their night train network under the brand Nightjet. Nightjet trains still connect Munich, Vienna, Zurich, Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, Milan, Rome and other cities.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “CityNightLine” as former Swiss company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as former Swiss company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q673261. VIAF identifies the subject as 694145858106423021818. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995, 2007 and 2016.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “CityNightLine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.