When I’m on a sleeper train I can barely sleep, such is my state of expectation. Everything, from the handsome ticket to the unsociable departure time to the identity of other passengers, is liable to induce excitement.
Once in the cosy, linen-provisioned room, the door closed, there’s the sound of furtive passengers in the corridor, preparations and salutations, a drinks trolley. I’m sometimes torn between sitting down for a meal in the dining car or eating in my compartment.
Another important choice comes at bedtime: to draw the blind or not. Do I want night skies and bright stations, or the inky-black privacy of my moving cell? The lexicon of night trains is a lulling Kraftwerk lyric: wagon-lit, couchette, Trans Euro Nacht, Orient Express, Schlafwagen. Then there’s the therum-thererum, of iron wheels passing over fishplates – precisely the rhythm of a rocking crib.
So the announcement last week that the excellently named French startup Midnight Trains is going to relaunch sleeper services from 12 cities from 2024 is the best travel news I’ve heard in ages. Europe’s once-dreamy network of night trains – which lasted from the 19th century to the 1980s – has been dwindling in recent decades, thanks to high operational costs, privatisation and the rise of the five-quid flight. That we might revive the fine art of overnight train travel could be one of the best legacies of the pandemic. A slower, greener, safer form of travel simply does not exist. Everything (almost) about sleeper trains is beautiful.
I don’t think I can remember more than three flights out of the scores I’ve taken. But I remember every sleeper train journey. My first taste was during a couple of Interrails in the 1980s, when I used night services to save on hotels and to cover long distances. I was a travel virgin, and notching up capital cities, and rail terminuses, was a big deal for me. I didn’t have the money for upgrades, so travelled in seated carriages or shared with strangers as well as my travel companion – a friend on my first month-long grand tour, a girlfriend on the subsequent one.
Each journey brought me small epiphanies. Sleepers often slow down at night for maintenance on the line: at one long hiatus on a Madrid-Rome train, I pushed down the window to look out over the French Riviera from a high vantage point. The sultry night came in, a million white lights flickering over the bay of Cannes, or Nice, or Monaco.
On a last-minute winter break, a sleeper from Tangier to Marrakech allowed me and two friends to dump the package hotel we’d booked and swap a hashish-blurred French-feeling city for a more Arab one. The journey took us through Casablanca, which is not much of a tourist destination despite the film. I peeked out in the small hours to see industrial estates and suburban sprawl. I wasn’t disappointed. I wasn’t staying there.
On an Interrail I took when I turned 50, there weren’t many sleeper services available and almost none on the route I wanted to follow. But I did get a single compartment from Berlin to Vienna. It was a Czech-run train, and I was served Hungarian goulash in my compartment. I slept little, as I had taken a journey in the opposite direction 30 years earlier and, as we approached Prague, I looked out to see the city. I recognised nothing, but the memories rolled all night.
The end of a sleeper journey is nothing like a normal arrival. The sewery pong of Paris, the musical notes of the tannoy in Amsterdam, meeting lines of commuters at Berlin Hauptbahnhof … the most banal things seem momentous. The night train traveller lives against the grain, on another clock. Stations become pilgrimage sites. Bidding farewell to the train is heartbreaking.
What a great European invention! Except it’s not. As early as 1837, first-class passengers on some trains between London and the north-west of England were invited to rest on makeshift beds made from webbing strung between the seats. Queen Adelaide had a private sleeping car adapted from this model.
In 1865, George Pullman launched his luxury Pioneer sleeping carriage – with upper and lower berths – in the US. On this side of the Atlantic, the first true sleeper carriage was operated by the North British Railway on the east coast line between King’s Cross and Glasgow in 1873.
Just before lockdown, the Caledonia Sleeper launched new bedrooms on its London to Scotland services. They look a bit corporate to me, to be honest, but interior décor was never the draw on those journeys. When I’ve taken sleepers from Euston, the memorable aspects were malt whiskies, chats with Munro baggers, haggis dinners (probably microwaved, but haggis always tastes great) and, above all, the wonder of waking to the russets and purples of the Highlands.
Sadly, London to Fort William for two currently costs £865 return, so you’d have to be a Queen Adelaide (or a Scottish MP, perhaps) to use the Cally. That’s the major “almost” qualifier in my perfect picture of sleepers. Let’s hope Midnight Trains can keep its prices competitive in the interests of common people – and the planet!
