Night train renaissance: For a greener trip, Europe's rolling back to the past

It's 11 p.m., and in the palatial central train station in Bologna, Italy, one platform is becoming a gathering point for bleary-eyed passengers, neck pillows and luggage in tow.

Among them is four-year-old Dyuthi Mantaih and her father, Nagendra. 

"We are from India, actually, so we are used to travelling on night trains," he said. 

But it will be their first time on board a NightJet, a new generation of sleeper trains from the Austrian national railway company ÖBB.

For the better part of 20 years, trains like the NightJet have become harder to find in Europe, as national railways have gradually abandoned the idea of running a hotel on rails.

But in an age of climate anxiety, replacing planes with trains — which can save hundreds of kilograms of CO2 emissions over the course of a single journey — looks increasingly like the way of the future. All of a sudden, operators are eyeing a mode of travel that, less than a decade ago, seemed destined for the history books.

The Nightjet soon pulls into Bologna station, and the sleepy platform leaps into action. Luggage is loaded; strollers are lifted onboard. Inside the carriages, travellers greet the fellow passengers with whom they will share the rest of the night. 

Within a few minutes, the train is pulling away — starting on an eight-hour journey to Austria through the dead of night.

The rise and fall of night trains

On board, it looks like you're inside a futuristic hotel. Soft white light fills the corridors; live monitors show the few stops our journey will make.

A few seconds after we pull out of the station, Ivan Pöllauer introduces himself. Since 2016, he's been a steward for Newrest, a hospitality company contracted by ÖBB to run their night train service. 

"Not every night, but every second or third night, I'm on the NightJet," he told me.

Deftly swaying as the train carriage moves back and forth, Pöllauer gives me a tour of the NightJet's accommodations. A sleeper car cabin, the most luxurious option, comes with bunk beds for two, a table for meals and a private bathroom and shower. 

A welcome kit includes slippers, a pillow and snacks, and a panel on the wall allows you to change the lights, control the temperature and call a member of staff for a drink or hot meal.

In North America, night trains like these are still rare. Distances between cities are, in most places, impractically long, and there's no high-speed network like in Europe that could help cut the time.

There's also far less competition than in Europe — in Canada, passenger trains always take a back seat to those operated by freight companies Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, which also own the railways they run on.

As a result, Canada's Via Rail operates only three sleeper trains. The longest, from Toronto to Vancouver, is an overland cruise of sorts, aimed at travellers who want to take it slow and enjoy the scenery. After all, that journey takes four days by train — at least. The other two, from Halifax to Montreal and Winnipeg to Churchill, Man., stretch out journeys that take less than three hours by air into a day or more on the rails.

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In Europe, it wasn't so long ago that night trains were a routine mode of travel over long distances. Up until the late '90s, it wasn't unusual for a person to leave work in Brussels, hop on a night train to dine, sleep, shower and shave, and arrive fresh for a morning meeting in Zurich or Milan the next day.

"Every night, there was a whole fleet of night trains that left Paris," said Mark Smith, a former station manager for British Rail better known today as the author of The Man in Seat 61, a website dedicated to train travel. "Some were killed off by high-speed trains… [and] some were killed off by economics."

The death knell for night trains was really the rise of Europe's budget airlines. Starting in the mid '90s, companies like Ryanair and EasyJet began offering flights for a fraction of the cost of a train journey, cutting travel times dramatically.

"Within a decade, everyone could fly no-frill airlines for nothing," said Bernhard Rieder, a spokesperson for ÖBB. "It opened a new era of travelling."

Lack of co-operation

Flights also benefitted from direct and indirect government subsidies that made them much less expensive to operate. While trains were required to pay per-kilometre fees and taxes to cover electricity and track maintenance, international flights were exempt from tax on tickets and fuel.

According to green transport advocacy group Transport & Environment, these tax breaks alone are worth more than €47 billion ($70 billion Cdn) a year. 

"It's a massive hidden subsidy," Smith said.

But train operators also played their part in the night train network's decline. National rivalries and competing regulations make it harder than ever to schedule cross-border train routes. 

"Certain train companies have ended up at each other's throats, instead of co-operating," Smith said.

Meanwhile, surge pricing systems — introduced to compete with budget airlines — mean that few train companies have booking systems that can actually communicate with each other.

But the real issue has always been cost. 

"It's ridiculously expensive to operate [a night train]," Rieder said. There's overnight staff, laundry and cleaning, and the cost of providing hot meals and breakfast to hungry passengers.

Facing a loss, most rail companies stopped investing in replacing their sleeper cars, making the remaining night trains even less appealing. 

"Pretty soon, we had the French getting out, [then] the Swiss," Rieder said. Spain cancelled its routes in 2013. "The latest was Germany. They stopped in 2016."

With major operators at the heart of Europe's train network abandoning their nighttime fleets, tracks were closed overnight for freight and maintenance. Scheduling night trains became harder than ever — and all of a sudden, night trains looked like a thing of the past.

A new era of sleeping

When Germany abandoned night train travel, Rieder said, "we had the same option: either we stop, or we believe in night trains, and invest."

Where other companies saw a liability, ÖBB saw an opportunity. Night trains historically accounted for a much larger part of the company's business than that of larger competitors like Germany's Deutsche Bahn. Centrally located in Austria, ÖBB could easily take over key cross-continental routes, using sleeper cars abandoned by bigger operators.

"It was risky," Rieder said, but overnight, they became arguably Europe's leading brand for night train travel.

Part of ÖBB's model has been to try to find new ways to keep ticket prices down. The deluxe cabin Pöllauer showed me onboard the NightJet isn't cheap — on most dates, it's at least €300 ($440 Cdn) per person for a journey that would be half as much by air. But on most trains, there's only one alternative: sharing a couchette compartment with anywhere from one to five strangers.

This idea can turn off even the most diehard of train fans. Juri Maier, chairman of rail advocacy group Back on Track Germany, recalls one disastrous attempt to win his kids over to the night train lifestyle. 

"We had a lady in [the couchette] who was really, really snoring," he said. "I had to organize earplugs for the whole family…. It was not a good experience."

But couchettes exist for a reason. A major problem with the business has always been that a single car of a night train can carry just a fraction of the passengers of a daytime seater car. 

"On a sleeping car, you have 20 people in one carriage, if it's full," Rieder said. "On a day train, you can have 120."

Historically, that has meant forcing people to sacrifice privacy if they want a lower ticket price. But a growing number of start-ups are trying to find another solution. 

In Germany, Canadian-run Luna Rail is designing new stacked seating prototypes that mimic the first-class seats of an airline. 

"The idea is to be able to provide an alternative to flying," Anton Dubrau, Luna Rail's founder, told me. "Because there is a relatively large number of people per rail car, it is possible to offer relatively good prices."

On board ÖBB's train to Austria, I saw another solution. Pöllauer took me to what looked like a wall of safety deposit boxes. These, he explained, are ÖBB's new "mini-cabins."

"It's the same that you know from Japan, the mini-hotels that they have in the airport," he said. "You have a private [bed], also a place for your luggage and your shoes… and, a window."

Inside, there was just enough space to sit up and enjoy a meal on a tray that pulls down from the wall. A divider between two compartments can be retracted so neighbours (or couples) can socialize. It's a definite upgrade on the couchette experience — and all for a fraction of the cost.

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The future of travel

In the morning, as the train wound its way through the autumn foliage of the Austrian Alps, Pöllauer delivered breakfast trays with hot coffee, jam and buns. The passengers of the mini-cabins poured out into the hall, or rolled back their shutter-like doors to chat with strangers across the way.

The night before in Bologna, I had heard many reasons why these passengers had chosen the night train. For one business traveller, it was half the cost of a flight. For a couple vacationing from Puglia, the departure times were much better, even if they did spend the night in a seat.

There were other perks as well. "It's always a bit romantic," a woman named Sara told me. "You can read, you can look outside—"

"You can get off and smoke a cigarette at the stop," her partner, Michele, laughed.

But for operators, night trains are still harder to justify. Rieder told me that even though there is a "huge demand" for their overnight routes, the company still relies on subsidies from the Italian and Austrian governments to break even. 

"Night trains cannot operate on a fully private basis," he said.

After decades of neglect, the existing stock of sleeper cars is also extremely limited, and building new ones remains prohibitively expensive for new entrants. 

European Sleeper, a startup operating night trains from Brussels to Prague, has survived by renting Germany's old rolling stock. It is one of few such start-ups to survive — a similar venture, Midnight Trains, failed before taking a single journey.

"We would love to run … a night train with modern rolling stock, with more comfort… and also more privacy options," European Sleeper's co-founder Chris Engelsman told me. "But it is indeed quite a challenge." 

For Maier, "the market has to change" before night trains become a real alternative to flying. Rising ticket prices for airlines and greater awareness of their environmental cost can only do so much. Smith agrees. 

"You don't have to make it equal to whatever EasyJet are charging for two hours in a tiny seat," he said. "What you do have to do is make it affordable for ordinary mortals, rather than a luxury tourist experience."

In the meantime, at least, those companies that have got their start will have no problem filling seats. ÖBB's NightJets still book up weeks in advance.

For Pöllauer, that's a perk. 

"I'm happy that my trains are, every time, full," he said, "because then the nights pass quicker."