The slow return of the night train
Board a train in Paris in the early evening, eat dinner as the suburbs slide past, and wake somewhere near the Alps with the whole day still ahead of you. For a long stretch of the twentieth century this was simply how Europeans crossed the continent, and for a while it looked as though the experience had gone for good. The sleeper train, written off as a relic, is now quietly returning to the timetable, and the reasons say as much about how we travel as about the trains themselves.
There was once a dense web of these services. In their heyday the great night expresses carried passengers in curtained comfort from one capital to another, with dining cars, uniformed attendants and berths made up while they slept. A single network of sleeping cars stitched the continent together, so that a traveller could board in one country at dusk and step down in another at breakfast without ever changing trains. Rail was, for decades, the natural way to cover a long distance overnight.
Two rivals ended the golden age almost at once. Budget airlines learned to sell a seat across Europe for less than the price of a berth, and high-speed day trains shrank journeys that had once needed a whole night into a comfortable afternoon. Faced with competition above and below, the overnight services looked slow and expensive, and one by one the operators withdrew them. Through the 1990s and 2000s route after route was quietly closed, the carriages sold off or left to rust in sidings.
What has changed since is not the technology but the mood. As the environmental cost of flying has become harder to ignore, a growing number of travellers have begun to choose the ground over the air, even when it takes longer. Operators noticed. An Austrian state railway, almost alone at first, began buying up abandoned routes and rebranding them, and its overnight network has since become the model that others copy. New services now link cities that had not seen a sleeper in a generation.
A night on board is not quite the luxury of the old expresses, but it has its own logic. Passengers choose between a reclining seat, a shared couchette and a private cabin, the price rising with the privacy. The appeal is practical as much as romantic: you travel while you would have been asleep anyway, you step off in the middle of a city rather than at an airport on its outskirts, and, if the rocking of the carriage agrees with you, you arrive rested rather than frayed. The journey, in other words, is folded into the night.
For all the enthusiasm, the trains are stubbornly hard to run at a profit. A sleeper earns its keep for only part of each day, the carriages are expensive and in short supply, and a service that crosses three borders needs careful coordination between railways that do not always cooperate. Several governments, persuaded that the routes serve a public purpose, have stepped in with subsidy or with orders for new rolling stock. Without that support, most operators admit, the sums would rarely add up.
None of this makes the night train a straightforward replacement for the aeroplane. It is slower, often dearer by the mile, and it can never reach the places a flight can. Its champions are careful, when pressed, not to oversell it: what they offer is an alternative for a particular kind of journey, not a cure for the whole problem of long-distance travel. Seen that way, the sleeper’s return is best understood as a growing niche rather than a revolution, a reminder that speed is not the only thing a traveller might value.