An ode to the night train

In 1998, my father, a software engineer, took our family on a night train from Stockholm to Luleå, 50 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Back then, the price of one air ticket was the same as four inter-rail passes. There was a dining car with plush seats and a cinema. After dinner, we watched “Sliding Doors” with Swedish subtitles and — in the sleeping car — I drifted off to the sound of bells ringing at level crossings as the train trundled past lakes and pine forests, lakes and pine forests, lakes and pine forests, and, occasionally, the odd town. It was Sweden in June; it never got dark. It was the romance of travel in its most potent form.

Since then, I have taken every opportunity to travel by night train. In Germany, I remember super-comfy, modern City Night Line carriages with berths arranged down the side of the train. In the Copernicus dining car from Amsterdam to Prague, I admired the constellations rendered in punched metal in the ceiling. On one train, I’d find traveling companions with whom I could chat; on another, I’d have a superlative cheese plate and shuffle off to bed with legs sore from skiing. In the dining car of the Trenhotel from Paris to Barcelona, the only thing crisper than the cava was the white linen tablecloth.

These night trains had something in common. They were mostly full — with young travelers eager to discover Europe or avoid the environmental impact of short-haul air travel. This wasn’t just nostalgia on rails, it was the future, one of the ways in which a frictionless Europe was dreaming itself into being. Fall asleep in one cosmopolitan city, greet the dawn in another.

Most of these trains no longer exist. At the Schaarbeek railway station in Brussels, night trains used to depart for the French Riviera, Venice and London (via boat train). Today, it is a museum: Train World. The few lines remaining are being scaled back, are under review, or only run sporadically. I’m not the only person who finds modern airports the most soul-crushing non-spaces mankind has created. Why are night trains being consigned to the sidings? The answer, I was sad to discover, seemed to terminate in Brussels.

I started by calling Mark Smith, whose website, the Man In Seat 61, is the go-to resource for independent train travel. It can tell you which dining cars serve draft pilsner or how to find the right guichet to buy tickets for Istanbul at the station in Bucharest.

“Night trains are the most vulnerable, economically, of all the services,” Smith said. A seating carriage can carry about 80 people: A sleeping car set up to accommodate couples, only 24. A day train can do three or four round trips on a route: An overnight train can only do a single run. In the past, this hadn’t mattered. Night trains don’t compete with day trains. They trundle along through the moonlit hours: The track is just sitting there, unused. As long as a night train covers its own cost, why not run one?

Enter the European Commission. For some time now, it has wanted old-fashioned state railway companies to evolve. If competition worked wonders in air travel, surely it would do the same to trains. And so, in 2001, the Commission set out its first rail package, which separated the management of infrastructure from the provision of transport services. The operation that runs the trains could no longer be the same one that owned and maintained the tracks; otherwise, how would new competitors ever get on the tracks?

As so often with the EU, the next stage was the unintended consequence. “Under [the] new EU rules, all trains have to pay hefty track access fees,” said Smith. Night trains worked when access to the tracks was free. But for the companies that balance the books selling access to the rails, “free” is not a word they wanted to hear.

Of all the night trains I’ve taken, German Railways (DB) had the finest. So imagine my sadness when they said they would be withdrawing all night services in December this year. Gute Nacht.

I asked them why. “Like every rail transport company, DB Fernverkehr has to pay for the night train services for track access,” said spokeswoman Susanne Schulz. For years, as operating costs rose and revenues stagnated, DB’s night trains produced losses in millions of euros annually. Competition is fierce, she added; cheap flights, budget hotels, night buses (some of them run by DB). “The night train services are a niche business,” she said.

DB’s night trains carry just 1.3 million passengers a year, equivalent to about 1 percent of the ridership on daytime train services.

I was also not the only one who was upset. Back on Track is a pan-European pressure group supporting cross-border rail. I called Poul Kattler, one of their members. “We know very well that we have an uphill struggle,” he lamented. “There are a number of frequent night train travelers, but for the general public they are thinking of something which is a bit historic, a bit nostalgic.” In 1998, taking the night train was a cheap option compared to flying, but that’s no longer the case.

Track access fees, he told me, were just part of the story. Trains pay taxes on fuel, but there’s no tax on aviation fuel. In some countries, rail tickets are subject to VAT. Plane tickets are not. According to Kattler’s calculations, which he recently presented to the European Parliament, there is effectively a €61 subsidy per traveler per 1,000-kilometer air journey within Europe. “It’s surprising railways can survive at all, when they face such unfair competition,” he said.

I asked some well-placed EU sources about the situation. The Commission knows full well that overnight trains are being discontinued, but believes it is up to railway undertakings to decide which services they offer based on individual business cases. These sources say greater transparency and separation of accounts between infrastructure management and business operations has simply shown how night train services are money-draining operations anyway.

To be honest, I still don’t know who to blame for the death of the night train. Yes, the Commission has attempted to introduce competition into a system that seems to lend itself to monopolies. But the rail companies haven’t tried that hard to save the night train either. Many night train carriages are now 40 years old; rather than invest in replacements, companies have been happy to let them fall apart. And trying to book a ticket on a night train has always been a colossal pain. In an age in which you can book a plane ticket with the tap of an app, most rail operators’ websites are as inviting as the business end of a staple gun.

There are glimmers of hope, but even these are in danger of flickering out. The Russians have realized there’s a business opportunity: Three times a week, there’s a Paris-Moscow sleeper with compartments fit for an oligarch. Austrian Railways might step in and take over some of the discontinued routes in Germany, but it’s all over for night trains to Copenhagen or Amsterdam. The overnight from Zagreb to Munich I took this summer was a sad affair. Not only was there no dining car; there was no locomotive until an hour after our scheduled departure.

Times change. Good things come to an end. But night trains should not have run their course. Every year across Europe, millions of people take them; because they can’t fly for medical reasons, because they want to save the planet, or, like me, because they sentimentally cling to the idea that the journey is as important as the destination. It’s a shame that Brussels, in its enthusiasm for competition, has thrown one of life’s simple pleasures under the bus.

Frances Robinson is a freelance journalist based in London. She has traveled from the Arctic Circle to Istanbul on night trains.

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