Snälltåget was set up in 2006 (first departure January 31, 2007) as Veolia Transport after partial deregulation of the Swedish rail network running ad hoc services. Regular weekend services began in 2009 (expanding to weekdays in 2010), after the network was fully deregulated, running in direct competition with the state-owned operator SJ. The summer night train extension to Berlin was launched in 2012 with the network rebranding as Snälltåget in November 2013.[1]
From September 2016, a brand new fleet of Class 193 Vectron locomotives were added to replace the hired commonly used Hector RailClass 242 Taurus and the Class 241 Traxx. Together with coaches from Germany, they started operation at 200 km/h, the first time for locomotives and railcars in Sweden.
In April 2024 it was announced that one of the daily departures on the Stockholm-Malmö route would be extended to Copenhagen Central Station station via the Øresund Bridge during the summer, in addition to the Stockholm-Berlin night train which already made a stop at the Copenhagen Ørestad station.[8]
In hiking and skiing seasons, Snälltåget operates night trains between Malmö and Storlien, via Stockholm and Åre.[10]
Between April and September, as well as on selected days during the rest of the year a night train also operates from Stockholm to Berlin, via Malmö and Hamburg.[3]
In winter, a train runs weekly between Malmö and Innsbruck, via Salzburg and Zell am See, serving multiple stations with connections to Austrian ski resorts.[11]
^The name is cognate to German Schnellzug, meaning fast train, although using an archaic meaning of snäll (the word means kind/nice in modern Swedish).
