The new age of the night train

In 2015 I was writing a book, Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper. This “rise” — the development, in the late 19th century, of a network of sleepers, each with its cargo of wealthy passengers being lulled in lambent cabins — I evoked from historical material. The “fall” I experienced personally. 

In attempting to duplicate the original Orient Express route, I got as far as Bucharest on two sleepers, but made the final approach to Istanbul’s fabled Sirkeci station (which was closed) on a rail-replacement bus service. I was more often in a couchette compartment than a sleeper properly so-called. (Couchettes don’t have sinks.) Dining cars were a rarity on my trips: one fellow traveller told me, “The key to using sleeper trains these days is a good Marks and Spencer’s salad.” But I did eat microwaved risotto with a plastic fork on the now defunct Paris-Venice sleeper operated by Thello, an Italian-French company.

The gloomy backdrop to my writing was the announcement by Deutsche Bahn in 2015 that it would be abandoning its City Night Line sleepers, backbone of the European network. I tried to conclude on a positive note by quoting some railfans, including a Swedish man whose faith in the environmental benefits of night trains prompted him to say, quite severely, “You must not end pessimistic.” 

He must be in a better mood now, because new European sleepers are cropping up like daffodils, and the imperative behind them is environmental. There is a “demand for green mobility”, as the EU transport commissioner, Adina Vălean, put it earlier this year, when announcing new cross-border rail projects and pledging to assist the operators by “breaking down the many barriers” they face.

It has never been easy to start a sleeper train service. Their begetters must be diplomats as well as engineers. Before the Orient Express could begin running in 1883, its operator, Wagons-Lits, had to negotiate contracts with the Eastern Railway Company of France, the Imperial Railways of Alsace-Lorraine, the Grand Duchy of Baden State Railways, the Kingdom of Württemberg State Railways, the Royal Bavarian Lines of Communication, the Royal Imperial Office for the Operation of State Railways in Vienna and the Royal Rumanian Railways, among others. 

But for the Dutch entrepreneur, Elmer van Buuren, who (together with his business partner Chris Engelsman) has crowdfunded a new sleeper, the difficulty has been part of the pleasure: “When someone says something’s impossible, that’s when I switch on.” Next month, several years of hard work will culminate in his Good Night Train entering service between Berlin and Brussels, via Amsterdam.

Van Buuren spent a lot of time telling me about track-access charges — enough for me to realise I wouldn’t want to tangle with them. They were introduced in the 1990s at the beginning of the process of liberalising the European train market and opening it to private operators. The cost varies between countries and can be high. But despite administrative headaches, the zeitgeist is with van Buuren, who plans to add an Amsterdam-Barcelona leg to his service in 2025. As his website puts it, sleeper trains are “better for the Earth”, whereas aeroplanes are less good, although for a long time, that didn’t matter.

The liberalisation of European aviation — which proceeded simultaneously with that of rail — was at first the more telling development. The EU saw the new budget flights as a means of enfolding far-flung spots such as Dublin or Stockholm into the European embrace, whereas sleeper trains were considered lumbering museum pieces. You could see aviation getting the upper hand in the way that plans for nocturnal Eurostars were scuppered in 1997 — the idea had been that they would come down from Scotland, and the north, calling at Stratford International in east London en route to France. That’s why Stratford International was built, and why it was called that. But cheap flights undermined the business case, and Stratford is “International” in name only.

Wagons-Lits trains were like Schengen incarnate, the dining-car bill payable in any currency, the conductors multilingual 

It seemed at the time that the budget airlines and high-speed day trains were ending the Wagons-Lits dreamworld created with the inauguration of the Orient Express, the Calais-Mediterranée Express (forerunner of the Train Bleu), the Sud Express, the Rome and Simplon Expresses — all part of that great narcotic conspiracy, with its cashmere blankets, pressed linen and soft illumination, the W-L trademark being the pink, silk-shaded table lamps in the dining cars. There was always a reading light next to the pillow, a little hook to hang your watch on, and a bell push to summon the sleeping-car conductor, who did not himself sleep but presented the passengers’ passports to the authorities so that they could dream on as borders were crossed. Wagons-Lits trains were like Schengen incarnate, the carriages compatible with whatever locomotive a host country might present, the dining-car bill payable in any currency, the conductors multilingual.

The first world war interrupted the reverie, but the next two decades marked the heyday of the European sleeper. A new version of the Orient Express — the Simplon Orient — was mandated by the Allied powers; it headed east by a more southerly route, a lifeline for newly created Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, the original OE was rerouted to avoid Germany — all of which shows the centrality of night trains to European life. Ticket prices came down, becoming affordable to literary types, and this was a great age of British railway-borne travel writing, a reaction against the insularity and xenophobia that had fomented the war. In his book Children of the Sun, Martin Green wrote of the “dandies” of interwar literature: people such as Robert Byron, Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, who tended to write travel books and had an internationalist outlook.

Britain’s relationship with those trains, by the way, has been complicated. In 1891, Wagons-Lits changed the name of its flagship service from “Express d’Orient” to “Orient Express” as a nod to the importance of rich British clients, and the breakfast on the Train Bleu was egg and bacon. But, being an island nation, Britain developed a high propensity to fly when that became an option.

A film of 1948, Sleeping Car to Trieste, satirises British alienation from the Wagons-Lits world. In the dining car of the titular train, the “top chef of the Wagons-Lits company” is badgered by a crass Englishman who is “thinking of going into the catering racket”. When the chef offers a recipe for cooking white fish involving herbs and wine, the Englishman commends the British method — put it in water and boil it — as being much less trouble. The chef, horrified, says, “But there is no sauce!” — to which the Englishman responds, “Oh, there’s usually a bottle of sauce lying around somewhere.” He then offers the chef a recipe for roly-poly pudding. It’s true that the two UK sleepers — to Cornwall and Scotland — are much smarter than they were five years ago, but you need a continent for true, expansive sleeper style.

Alongside the travel writers on the trains were the sensationalists. If your characters were journeying into the night with strangers, your readers expected sex and death. The Simplon Orient was the setting for Murder on the Orient Express and much of From Russia with Love, in which James Bond spends almost the entire journey either having sex or battling fellow spies. In reality, there was only ever one suspected murder on the Orient Express (in 1950 the body of Eugene Karpe, a US naval attaché in Bucharest, was found lying by the line near Salzburg), but there was plenty of sex. Sex workers frequented the train, and the standard Wagons-Lits arrangement was a two-berth.

After the second world war, the decline set in. One railway historian told me that the pivotal moment had actually come in 1938, when Neville Chamberlain had his futile “peace for our time” meeting with Hitler. That he flew to such a high-profile engagement was ominous for rail.

The fall of the Iron Curtain inhibited the Orient Express, which the communists considered a class provocation; they liked to keep it waiting in Bulgarian sidings. People no longer dressed for dinner on the night trains, and soon after the war Agatha Christie was bitten by bedbugs on the Simplon Orient Express. In the 1970s, the blue-and-gold Wagons-Lits trains began to be diluted, their increasingly ghostly-looking sleepers or diners mingled with the carriages of state operators. The Orient Express finally disappeared from the European timetable in 2009, by which time it was terminating at Strasbourg.

We might date the revival from 2016, when the Austrian state operator, ÖBB, took over most of the night trains relinquished by Deutsche Bahn, to run them successfully under the Nightjet brand. In 2017, the “Flygskam” or “Flight Shame” movement originated in Sweden, with Greta Thunberg a standard bearer. The ante was further upped by “Tågskryt”, meaning “Train Brag”, so that whereas “I’m on a train” was once an apology for a poor phone signal, it is now a claim to the moral high ground.

John Stewart, the environmentalist and longtime campaigner on aviation, told me: “There’s a whole new attitude compared to 10 years ago” — the crucial event, to his mind, being the drafting in 2019 of the European Green Deal, which is supposed to make the EU carbon neutral by 2050.

“Meanwhile,” said Stewart, “the climate campaigners are getting more united, and I think the pandemic was a factor. Zoom is persisting, and it’s undermining the case for short-haul business flights.” He expects the short-haul flight bans pioneered in France to spread, but he concedes: “It’s too early to say the number of flights over Europe is declining, but there’s a feeling that they ought to be.”

What’s certain is that the number of night trains is rising. When I read of each new arrival, I imagine the details flickering into place on one of those old-fashioned strip-flap station indicator boards. For instance, late last year, a new Nightjet from Stuttgart to Venice was flagged up, and another from Munich or Vienna to La Spezia in Italy. The Prague-Zurich sleeper, closed in 2017, was recently revived by the Czech national operator, and Swedish Railways has started a new sleeper between Stockholm and Hamburg. This month, the Dutch tour operator GreenCityTrip will add an Amsterdam-Prague service to its network. From 2024, a start-up called Midnight Trains will begin running luxury sleepers (“hotels on rails”) over a network radiating from Paris. Also next year, we can expect a luxury Italian service, the Orient Express La Dolce Vita. It will use refurbished vintage Wagons-Lits carriages, like the opulent Venice-Simplon Orient Express, which has been operating since 1982 and offers (to those who can afford it) not so much a pastiche as a recreation of the Wagons-Lits dreamworld.

But we must keep a sense of perspective. In the 1930s, almost every one of the 300 pages of the Thomas Cook Continental Timetable included at least one sleeper, and we are nowhere near that level, but who knows where Generation Z (“the Thunberg generation”, it has been called) might take us?

And then there is “romance”. On the above-mentioned Thello train, I stayed up late sipping white wine as we traversed the French Alps. I was wide-awake but might as well have been dreaming, what with the sudden gorges appearing beyond the tracks, and the rearing, moonlit mountains. I recall the luxuriousness of my quarters on the Nordland Night Train between Bodø and Trondheim in Norway, with padded rungs on the ladder to the top bunk (a Wagons-Lits touch) and a chocolate waiting on the pillow. Having the compartment to myself, I kept the blinds up to watch the strange, almost artificial-looking illumination of the sky at the time of the midnight sun. For about 50 miles, there were gold and mauve tones above the empty waters of the Trondheim Fjord. I remember breakfasting on a Portuguese custard tart and a delicious, velvety black coffee in the dining car of the Sud Express as we rolled through the suburbs of Lisbon in a rainstorm.

I also remember waking early on the Paris-Nice sleeper (which I still call the Train Bleu) as it rolled along the Riviera, past little stations almost overwhelmed with flowers, the Mediterranean Sea coming and going between palms and pink villas and starting to glitter. When we arrived at Nice station, which resembles a grand Victorian conservatory, the train guard felt entitled to wish us, not a “bonne journée”, but a “belle journée”. I jolly well had one, too, carrying the slight fatigue from having woken early as a badge of pride.

That said, I don’t think I can become a train bragger until I stop flying. I’ve taken plenty of budget flights in recent years, and they’ve all merged into one, whereas I remember vividly every sleeper trip I’ve taken. And isn’t this the whole point, post-Covid: to actually live your life?

Andrew Martin’s book ‘Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper’ is published by Profile

Photographs by Ambroise Tézenas for the FT

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