MOSCOW, December 17. /TASS/. Russian Railways is launching a new train service between Moscow and Berlin.

The first such train under dubbed Swift is to begin its journey from Moscow’s Kursky railway station on Saturday at 13:05 Moscow Standard Time. The operator of the upgraded service is the Federal Passenger Company, a Russian Railways subsidiary. For the time being, the trains will be operating twice a week, leaving Moscow on Saturday and Sundays and Berlin, on Sundays and Mondays. They will make stops in Smolensk, Orsha, Minsk, Brest, Terespol, Warsaw, Poznan, Rzepin, and Frankfurt an der Oder.

The coaches manufactured by the Spanish company Patentes Talgo S.L. are equipped with a system for an automatic changeover of the width of mounted wheels. This enables the operator to considerably slash the time that trains spend in Brest during the replacement of mounted wheels for the 1,520 mm ‘Russian’ track gauge with the ones for the 1,435 mm European track gauge. As a result travelling time will be reduced, as passengers will spend 20 hours 14 minutes en route between Moscow and Berlin instead of the 24 hours 49 minutes they have been spending so far