Almost two years and one pandemic after the big night train interview, people from the news magazine Der Spiegel contacted me again. This time they wanted to create a map with night train lines and needed help with the illustration.

The aim was to create a concise map showing the route of all night trains that start in Germany or cross Germany with suitable intermediate stops. After national railways Deutsche Bahn withdrew from the night train business in December 2016, these are all trains run by external operators such as Austrian railways ÖBB. The corresponding article is therefore entitled Gute Nacht, Deutsche Bahn (“Good night, Deutsche Bahn”).

Through my years of dealing with the subject (read: being a super nerd) I’ve got a good overview and it was not difficult to create a draft for the map on short notice. Der Spiegel’s graphics department then adapted it to their corporate design, and you can see the result in the image above.

Note that the final article is behind a paywall. However, apart from the map, it contains little additional information.