Oresundtrain - Traffic

Traffic

On the Danish side the trains stop often, about every 4 km, like a commuter train. On the Swedish side the trains stop much less often, more like inter-city trains, and they reach stations about 300 km from Copenhagen, like Gothenburg, Kalmar and Karlskrona. Most travellers in Sweden use it like a regional train for work commuting and similar shorter journeys, and local monthly passes are valid on the train.

Three trains per hour in each direction use the Oresund bridge, increasing to six trains per hour during the rush hour, each train using up to three sets coupled together, creating 237 metre long trains with 588 seats, providing a capacity of 1764 (3528) seats per hour. Increasingly this has turned out to be insufficient, and people have to stand during rush hours (into Copenhagen in the morning and to Malmö in the afternoon). The differences in salaries and house prices between Copenhagen and Malmö have increased interest in cross-border commuting. The trains cannot be lengthened because of platform length constraints. Earlier, the number of trains were limited to three per hour per direction due to the need to reverse at Malmö C restricting capacity. This restriction has been removed by in 2010 opened Malmö City Tunnel. Still some stations restrict capacity because there are only two tracks, shared with other trains, mainly Triangeln, Kastrup Airport and Nørreport, so more than 6 per hour isn't possible.

The combination of routes of an inter-city nature in Sweden with commuter-like routes in Denmark is often a source of trouble. The long-distance trains from Sweden often accumulate delays during the long journey. But delays cause trouble to commuter passengers having fixed work hours and don't want to add long margins, since they travel every day. Therefore DSBFirst nowadays have trains ready at Kastrup that go to Helsingør if the train from Sweden is delayed. In these circumstances the train from Sweden will terminate early and will not continue to Helsingør.