The Bliss of Being There by Morning
This is part of Airplane Mode, a series on the business—and pleasure—of travel right now.
I climbed aboard the train in Hamburg, Germany, just before midnight, already looking forward to the breakfast of warm cardamom buns and milky coffee I would get upon waking up in Copenhagen’s central train station. I had tried to catch a more comfortable sleeper train—the kind with bunk beds, private rooms, and a dining car—but even though two other trains make the same trip nearly every single night, every bunk was booked, and not just for this random Monday night.
The sleeper train business is booming this summer. Across Europe, the bunks on overnight trains—once viewed as a fading anachronism in an era of cheap EasyJet and Ryanair flights—are sold out, and even tickets for simple seats are hard to come by.
The resurgence is being driven by concerns about climate change and the emissions from those cheap jet flights. But environmental consciousness is also making Europeans rediscover the perks, efficiencies, and subtle luxuries of overnight rail travel. Schedules are largely crafted so travelers can board downtown in one major city in the late evening, eat dinner, doze off, and wake up at their destination in the morning.
My fellow passengers on this rather spartan Danish overnight train skewed younger; many of them were lugging stuffed hiking backpacks. My seatmate, a New Zealander on his way from Prague to Denmark for a music festival, told me that taking overnight trains has allowed him to save on hotels or hostels while skipping the taxi ride to airports located far away from city centers.
“Trains are the way of the future!” he said before pulling on his headphones. I rolled my sweater into a pillow and folded myself into my upright seat as best I could.
Overnight trains will take you from Paris to Vienna. From Rome to Munich or Vienna. From Berlin to Zurich, Stockholm, Brussels, or Budapest. From Zurich to Hamburg or Prague or Zagreb. From Milan to Sicily. From London to Penzance, at the far western end of England, or even from Stockholm across the Arctic Circle to the port town of Narvik in the Norwegian Arctic.
“It’s both a very efficient and also affordable way of traveling,” said Chris Engelsman, a co-founder of the sleeper train startup European Sleeper, a private Dutch cooperative that launched a Brussels–Amsterdam–Berlin night train to widespread publicity earlier this year.
“But actually more important is the feeling of adventure, the romance of it: getting on the train, late at night, seeing the lights of your hometown disappear, peeking out of the window in the middle of the night, and then, in the morning, you’re in a different city and a different landscape. That, for me, is so attractive.”
As a native Midwesterner, I kept thinking about the often-spotty rail connections and obscene travel times on Amtrak service back home in the United States. Wouldn’t this sort of scheduled intercity service—board in the evening, arrive in the morning—make the average eight-to-12-hour trip between scattered points in North America far more pleasant?
As I tried to doze off, the iconic train scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest kept popping into my mind, especially when Eva Marie Saint tells Cary Grant, in the dining car of the overnight train from New York City to Chicago, “It’s going to be a long night, and I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started.” (I was also less than tempted by the door stopper on East German history I’d packed in my bag.)
That movie hit the big screen in 1959, just as intercity rail travel in the U.S. was at its final peak and on the cusp of collapse. The train carrying Grant and Saint westward, the New York Central Railroad’s famed 20th Century Limited, would be canceled within the decade.
The New York Central Railroad itself would collapse in a desperate series of mergers that consumed rail operators in the late 1960s and early ’70s and ended after most railroads offloaded passenger service onto the newly created Amtrak and focused on pushing up profit margins by going a lot bigger on freight operations.
“When Amtrak started in 1971, they literally killed two-thirds of the trains that were running and took them right off the rails,” David Peter Alan, a longtime rail advocate and a contributing editor for Railway Age magazine, told me when I finally caught him by phone this summer. (He was in northern Manitoba on a two-week trip crisscrossing Canada by rail and the occasional bus.)
Despite tweaks in service, Alan said, Amtrak hasn’t added to its overall lineup of long-distance routes or made serious efforts to increase options, such as pairing a daytime train with a parallel overnight offering, in the decades since.
In Europe, too, night trains recently appeared to be in imminent decline as booming budget airlines offered fast, cheap connections across the continent and gobbled up market share. A number of major European railroads scrapped night train service, including Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, which decided in 2016 to shut down its fleet of sleeper trains.
Austria’s state-owned railway ÖBB decided to step in, scooping up many of Deutsche Bahn’s sleeper cars and taking over several routes with sleeper trains. The Austrian gamble on overnight rail—rebranded as “Nightjet”—came just before Swedish environmental activists, including Greta Thunberg, coined and popularized the term flygskam (“flight shame”) in an effort to stigmatize air travel, in what turned out to be a major boon to ÖBB.
In general, traveling by rail produces significantly less pollution and climate-warming emissions than flying does, although just how much varies. A 2020 analysis by the European Environment Agency found that rail travel is the most climate-friendly choice (but that solo car road trips could in some cases be worse for the climate than long-distance flights). Electric locomotives, which are favored by many European railways (and used on most of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, though few other places in the U.S.), are generally far cleaner than diesel engines—but the source of the electricity powering the trains can make a substantial difference, with renewables and nuclear plants generating far fewer emissions than coal-fired power does.
With a new kind of awareness, growing numbers of regular travelers in Europe are now checking for alternatives before booking a flight—and when a night-train alternative exists, “the trains are fully booked,” said Bernhard Rieder, a spokesman for ÖBB. “Perhaps on a Tuesday in November you’ll find a private cabin, but the rest of the year the train is completely full.” During the summer holidays, demand is so stiff that even upright seats in regular train cars are nearly all sold out.
The biggest thing holding back sleeper train dominance in Europe, in fact, is the lack of available sleeper cars. Most railroads stopped investing in overnight trains decades ago, leaving only a dwindling number of aging trains outfitted with bunks or sleeper compartments. The startup European Sleeper has struggled to find enough sleeper cars to operate routes and has had to hold off on expanding operations despite strong demand for tickets.
It’s something that ÖBB is now trying to address, spending 700 million euros to buy 33 brand-new sleeper trains from Siemens that should be delivered sometime before the end of the year. New tunnels, faster trains, and upgraded, high-speed tracks will also likely put new trips in ÖBB’s sights, including overnight service covering distances as far as Berlin to Rome, Rieder said.
The kind of rambling, continent-crossing, multiday journeys favored by Amtrak in the U.S. are out of the question for ÖBB’s business model. The ideal overnight, Rieder said, should leave one city between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. and arrive between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. the next day (“10-ish latest!”).
“We are not talking about pure holidaymakers taking five days to go from Chicago to L.A., which is a nice experience for them, but it’s not a business,” Rieder said. “If it comes to crossing the continent, then take the flight. It makes no sense to go from Warsaw to Lisbon on a train. OK, if you want, if you’re a freak—but we don’t talk about freaks. We talk about real travelers going for business, for vacation, or for family visits.”
The decline of sleeper trains in North America began much earlier than in Europe, as interstate highways and rapidly expanding airline networks proliferated. After commercial passenger rail collapsed in the late 1960s, long-distance train travel coalesced into only a handful of lengthy routes, many of them running over 24 hours, even without factoring in delays.
“If you go back to before the 1960s, there were overnight trains all over the place. Leaving Penn Station every night, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of overnight trains going to here, there, and everywhere: Florida, Chicago cars that ran through Los Angeles, San Francisco, all over the place,” said Jonathan English, a transit policy expert and fellow at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. “People could take the overnight train and it was the most common means of travel.”
I’ve ridden overnight trains in the U.S. too, but largely in the sense that the sole daily train happened to stop somewhere in the middle of the night. Sleeper trains—with beds, rooms, dining cars, and porters—do make up a core part of Amtrak’s offerings, but they differ dramatically from the kind of overnight service favored by European travelers, which pairs cities with convenient evening departures and morning arrivals.
“To do night trains like they’re talking about in Europe, then you need more frequency,” said James McCommons, a journalist and frequent train rider who spent a year on Amtrak writing a book about the system’s history. “Sometimes there’s only one train a day going through a major city. Sometimes it goes through in the middle of the day. Sometimes it goes through the middle of the night. And that’s why no one rides it.”
English, at NYU, remarked that overnight trains in North America “have tended to slip into the ‘attraction in themselves’ category.” He added: “It’s more like a cruise than a means of transportation.”
Alan, the contributing editor for Railway Age magazine, said that operational conflicts with freight railroads, which own the vast majority of track outside the Northeast Corridor, would prohibit the expansion of night trains in the U.S. anytime soon.
The only connection on Amtrak’s current schedule that would work for a traditional overnight connection, Alan said, is between Memphis and Chicago. But he quickly rattled off dozens of other connections that would work in theory. The Maple Leaf line, between New York City and Toronto—the two biggest cities on the Eastern Seaboard—takes about 12 hours, but runs only during the day.
Also, “L.A. to San Francisco is a natural” fit for a sleeper train, Alan told me, with the trip currently taking about 11 hours on the winding existing tracks. California is supposedly building a high-speed rail connection between the two cities, although the first small segment of the line, in the sparsely populated Central Valley, is currently massively over budget and years behind schedule, casting doubt over when, or even if, the line will ever be completed.
Could consumer demand—fueled by nostalgia, or perhaps some American flygskam—ever revitalize this type of travel in the United States?
“Overnight trains, especially for business use, are a wonderful idea. They kept the railroads going for a long, long time,” Alan said. If they could come back, he said, they’d be good for “anywhere you can name that would be anywhere from eight to 12 hours apart”—perfect for a good night’s sleep.
