Night Vision: Sleeping through Europe

Passengers disembarking from night trains at Lviv station in Ukraine (photo © Jerome Cid / dreamstime.com).

Night trains are back in vogue. That, at least, was the prevailing view of the media before Coronavirus brought most of Europe’s night trains juddering to a halt in March.

Last December, the UK political weekly New Statesman exuberantly reported the happy return of international overnight trains. The author applauded the ingenuity of Austrian rail operator ÖBB for “buying dozens of sleeper carriages from less farsighted operators.” He reported that “the soporifically soft ba-dum-ba-dum of wheels on rails lulled me to sleep.” As it should! That’s part of the appeal of overnight trains.

Some of the transatlantic perspectives on the supposed renaissance of Europe’s night trains have been fascinating. The American tech monthly Wired reported in November 2019 that travel on Swiss night trains was up 25% since the start of the year, which raised a few eyebrows at Swiss national rail operator SBB as the company isn’t actually running any night trains at the moment — though it is considering options for the future.

Wired’s writer speculated on how wonderful it would be if one could sleep one’s way from Paris to Berlin, clearly unaware that there already is a very comfortable night sleeper train linking the two cities — although, being only a weekly service and one operated by RZD Russian Railways, it perhaps doesn’t count as a real train in the eyes of American writers and editors.

Real night trains — and imposters

The New York Times was quick to climb on the night-train bandwagon, just before Christmas 2019 extolling the merits of ÖBB’s Vienna to Venice Nightjet service. The article was illustrated by a frightening picture, evoking memories of young Interrail pass holders sleeping their way through Europe in the 1970s. Sprawled over seats designed for daytime journeys, two young travellers are shown enduring what must surely have been a fairly sleepless night.

How much better it would have been if the editors had opted instead for an image of a comfortable Nightjet compartment with real sleeping berths. By contrast, the New Yorker in an excellent article by Anthony Lane (“The Romance of the Night Train”), published in May 2020, nicely distinguished between different kinds of on-board accommodation, emphasising that the sleeping car is the sane option.

There are proper night trains, the ones with sleeping cars designed for overnight travel, and then there are trains which just happen to run by night. The last couple of years has seen a modest increase in overnight sleeper services and a considerable increase in the number of overnight trains which rely on regular daytime carriages. You can travel this summer on a Romanian Interregio train all the way from Mangalia to Sibiu — 13 hrs 26 mins of overnight fun with 32 stops along the way. But, beware, this service uses regular carriages. There are no couchettes or sleeping cars.

Some may discern a hint of poetry in the idea of an overnight journey direct from Vienna to Germany’s Baltic resort of Warnemünde, but the appeal fades when one discovers that the train used for this 13-hour epic is one really designed for short regional journeys. Until recently the carriages used on this new overnight train ran on Austrian operator Westbahn’s route from Salzburg to Vienna. It may not be the most comfortable way of experiencing midsummer night. For more on this peculiar asceticism see the accompanying text by Paul Scraton.

How new is new?

There have indeed been some improvements in services. The Prague to Moscow sleeping cars ran just once-weekly last summer. But in this year’s schedules they operate daily. The euphoria over the supposed near-miraculous revival of Europe’s overnight train services reached a crescendo in mid- January this year, when a new twice-weekly Brussels to Vienna service was launched as the latest addition to ÖBB’s Nightjet network. The train also conveys carriages from Brussels to Innsbruck via Munich.

A lot of the debate around European night trains has hinged on the drama associated with routes being ‘axed’ — as it’s usually styled in the media – or a new service being launched. There has been too little analysis of changing travel patterns or of the factors within the European rail industry which promote or inhibit night train services.

This is indeed an interesting development, one which is very much to be welcomed, but it does need to be seen in context. This is not an entirely new train. It’s merely that, on two days each week, the regular night train from Düsseldorf to Vienna and Innsbruck starts in Brussels rather than Düsseldorf, running via Aachen to pick up its normal route at Cologne. And, on those two days when the train serves Brussels, it won’t serve Düsseldorf — perhaps not too onerous a burden as it’s just a short hop on regular local trains from Düsseldorf to Cologne to connect there into the night train to Austria.

We don’t have to dig too far back in the timetables to find the days when Brussels had a decent range of night train departures, including a yearround sleeper service to Vienna (which originated in Ostend to pick up ferry traffic from England) and two seasonal overnight trains to Innsbruck; one was called the Alpina Express and the other the Ski Express.

Media hype

So there has been a tendency in the media to exaggerate the renaissance of the night train, just as a few years ago many online and print media were proclaiming the demise of the night train. “Le train de nuit. C’est fini,” said the French daily Le Monde in February 2016, just a few weeks after RZD Russian Railways launched a new daily link between Moscow and Sofia, which took in five other European capitals along the way. True, that train from Russia to Bulgaria has now slipped from the timetables.

Faster daytime journey times

In western Europe, ever-faster daytime trains led to the demise of many night trains in the 1990s and thereafter. Thirty years ago, the fastest daytime trains from Madrid to Barcelona took seven hours. With such a prolonged journey time, it’s no surprise that many travellers opted for an overnight train, choosing one of the three evening departures from the Spanish capital; these trains all conveyed air-conditioned sleeping cars and a restaurant or bistro car. These days, Renfe’s sleek AVE trains dash between Madrid and Barcelona in just two-and-a-half hours and the demand for overnight trains has simply evaporated. The last surviving night train on the route ran in April 2015.

What is perhaps surprising is that so many short-hop night trains have survived. Barring for the recent cancellations due to Coronavirus, it’s still possible to sleep in crisp, clean sheets in the comfort of a sleeping car from Venice to Rome, Bratislava to Prague and Munich to Vienna. All three journeys take just four hours by day.

Infrastructure and rolling stock issues

It’s often said that the night train which once ran from Hamburg to Paris via Brussels was rendered uneconomic by the track access charges levied by the Belgian rail infrastructure manager Infrabel. Elsewhere across Europe there are myriad examples of avaricious track access charges having deterred night train operators. For a spell the night train from Budapest to Berlin terminated just short of the German border at Františkovy Láznĕ in the Czech Republic, merely to avoid the considerable costs which would be incurred if the train ran on over German tracks to Berlin. To minimise those hefty charges in Germany, the night train from Berlin to Budapest these days heads east from the German capital to reach the nearest international frontier, crossing over the River Oder into Poland, and then routing south through Wrocław to reach Czech territory.

Building a future for Europe’s night trains will thus require coordinated effort as rail operators and network infrastructure managers hammer out agreements for the allocation of costs and revenue. Take a hypothetical new night train from Denmark to Austria which trundles by night across Germany but hardly stops on the way. Germany would rightly expect to be paid something, but the charges levied could not be so large as to render the train service uneconomic.

Securing a stable and viable night train network for the mid 2020s and beyond will require huge investment in dedicated sleeping cars. The rolling stock which ÖBB acquired from Deutsche Bahn when the Austrian operator launched its Nightjet network was already nearing the end of its working life. ÖBB has ordered new carriages, but the first trains are not due for delivery until 2022. The reality is that operators looking to introduce new routes over the next year or two are going to be hard-pushed to find sleeping cars which meet the required safety and technical specifications to operate long overnight journeys across European borders.

Curiously, the one country beyond Austria which has shown real ingenuity in fostering an expanded night train network — with proper sleeping cars rather than merely using daytime trains on overnight schedules — is Ukraine. In that country, innovation has been driven by a combination of political opportunity and necessity.

With state operator Ukrzaliznytsia no longer operating services to Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, coupled with the trimming of scheduled services between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the Ukrainian rail company found itself with sleeping cars to spare. Most of these can only be used on the broader rail-gauge routes which are the norm in eastern Europe. As the Schengen area relaxed its visa regime for Ukrainian visitors, there was suddenly a new home market demand for travel to European Union destinations.

New services have been launched linking Kiev with both Vilnius and Rīga, and there’s now a direct daily train from the Black Sea port of Odessa to Przemyśl in south-east Poland (with onward connections from there to Vienna, Prague and Berlin). Przemyśl, like Rīga and Vilnius, can be reached from Ukraine without any gauge change. Ukrzaliznytsia sleeping cars also now run all the way from Kiev and Lviv to Vienna via Budapest, though this does require a change of gauge at Chop (on the Ukrainian-Hungarian border).

In Perspective

Changing attitudes towards travel, prompted in part by a fuller appreciation of how air travel is accelerating climate change, are helping fuel a renaissance in rail travel across Europe. That’s as true of overnight services as it is of day trains. But new night sleeper services require dedicated carriages that will take time to build.

This year we’ve already seen national governments in Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland expressing commitment to building night train networks. Although it’s likely that we shall see night trains running again from Amsterdam within the next 12 months, the majority of new services now being championed will not be able to secure sleeping cars for at least three years.

To fill the gap, we are likely to see rail operators offering more regular trains, with seated accommodation, during nocturnal hours. Examples of such trains are the Eurostar ski trains which leave London on Friday evenings in the winter, travelling overnight to the French Alps. German operator Deutsche Bahn now runs an extensive network of overnight ICE services linking major German cities — an ICE is just a regular train normally used on daytime services. These night-time ICEs are very competitively priced, often tempting passengers who might otherwise have opted for a coach journey to switch to rail. It seems unlikely that many passengers now using these cheap German night-time trains would have the financial resources to upgrade to a sleeping car if that option were available.

That captures the real conundrum surrounding the night train in Europe. An overnight journey in the comfort of a sleeping car, especially in a compartment with en suite facilities, is always going to be a pretty upmarket option. The challenge is to scale Europe’s current limited sleeper capacity and include options, like couchettes or airline-style sleeper-seats, which will still allow a good night’s rest without costing the earth. Only then will we see a fuller revival of overnight links as a competitive alternative to daytime travel.