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Sarah Marks spent the morning of her 29th birthday watching the Alps roll by from the window of a night train bound for Zurich after being gently shaken awake in her sleeping car.
“The train comes right next to the lake, and the mountains loom behind it,” Marks said wistfully. “I must say it’s very romantic.”
By the time she left Zagreb, Croatia in 2022, it had been four years since she had boarded a plane. It’s been around since Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist, started popularizing the term flygskam (“flying shame”).
They join a growing number of climate-conscious Europeans, especially young travelers, who are avoiding carbon-emitting planes and taking night trains. Along the way, they discovered a slower, richer way of traveling that many say was on the verge of extinction, spurring something like the revival of night trains.
“It’s amazing to me that you can go to sleep in one city and potentially wake up in another country,” said Marks, a Londoner who grew up flying several times a year. . “When I transferred from the plane to the train, it was easy because it was a great experience.”
public and private reinvestment
Although still a niche and relatively expensive market, demand for sleeper trains is increasing. According to online platform Trainline, room reservations for 2023 are up 147% compared to 2019, the year before the pandemic. A climate survey by the European Investment Bank also found that 62% of respondents supported a ban on short flights.
Governments are starting to reinvest in night trains as they look for ways to meet targets to reduce carbon emissions by 2030. The European Commission has selected three new overnight routes in a pilot program aimed at supporting cross-border travel, including by ambitious private start-ups.
“Government investment is somehow returning to the good old days when trains provided public services,” said Paul Kettler, one of the founders of pan-European rail advocacy group Back on Track. “Climate change comes at a price, and they are now willing to pay that price.”
Sleeper trains never completely disappeared, especially in Eastern Europe, but supporters say they have suffered from years of underinvestment while low-cost airlines sell tickets at a fraction of the cost. claims.
The National Railways diverted resources to daytime high-speed rail, and the government expanded airports and encouraged short-haul air travel by exempting most jet fuel. The death knell for sleeper trains was said to have arrived in 2015 when Germany’s Deutsche Bahn abolished its remaining overnight routes.
But things soon started to turn around. Austrian railway ÖBB has bet on night trains by acquiring all of Germany’s sleeping cars. They refurbished the vehicle, rebranded it Nightjet, and applied cost-cutting lessons learned from the aviation industry. Nightjet currently operates 22 international sleeper routes, mostly in Central Europe, but stretching from Vienna to Paris and Hamburg to Rome.
In December, Nightjet began rolling out 33 new seven-car trains equipped with room key cards, cell phone-transparent windows for better photos and digital thermostats in each compartment.
new kind of passenger
Thibault Constant, a former engineer with France’s state-run railway company SNCF and who has 250,000 followers on his YouTube channel Simply Railway, says NightJet probably saved the entire night train industry.
It is said that the atmosphere of sleeper trains has changed dramatically.
“Ten years ago, only old people and weirdos rode night trains,” Konstan, 27, said while riding a train in the Czech Republic. “Now I feel the same way about a lot of teenagers and all kinds of people.”
Supporters say NightJet’s success showed other national railroads that sleeper trains are worth upgrading. For example, in 2023 Czech and Hungarian railways began refurbishing their sleeping cars, and the Italian and Finnish national railway companies signed contracts for new sleeping cars.
Private companies are also stepping in to fill the service gap. European Sleeper began operating from Brussels to Berlin via Amsterdam last year, relying in part on crowdfunding, and extended its route to Prague in May. The European Commission has selected the company’s Amsterdam-Barcelona route as a pilot project.
Still, progress is slow. France’s much-touted proposal to invest $1.5 billion in night trains in 2021 has not yet begun, according to Back on Track. (France has reinstated four overnight routes from Paris to the south in the past two years.) And Spain’s Renfe scrapped its last train hotel route in 2020, but has not announced plans to bring it back.
Romance on the rails, with hurdles
Challenges include the absence of a central reservation platform for train tickets. More than 30 European carriers each have their own website. It’s also difficult to make a profit on night trains, given that the average night train has 20 to 40 berths, while daytime trains have around 70 seats.
Then there’s the issue of price and competition from low-cost airlines. For example, a 14-hour night train ride on Nightjet from Paris to Berlin in late April cost €139 for a couchette berth for four to six people, compared to €50 for a flight on low-cost airline Transavia. did. A private cabin on a train costs significantly more, while a reclining seat costs the same as on a plane.
But Marks pointed out that sleeping cars can save you money on a night’s stay in a hotel, not to mention the cost of traveling from a far-flung airport to the city centre. Major airline ticket prices rarely include baggage, seat assignments, or other additional charges.
Sleeper enthusiasts say the experience is worth the extra effort and expense.
Mark Smith, who runs the website “Man in Seat 61,” a guide to European train travel, says: It’s a lot of fun. ”
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Editor’s note: Albert Stam lives in Barcelona and writes about food, travel, and health. Find his work at https://www.albertstumm.com.
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