The Quiet Comeback of the Night Train

There is a sleeper train that leaves Zurich Hauptbahnhof at 9:42 in the evening and arrives in Amsterdam Centraal at 6:21 the next morning. I took it last month, with my wife, on the way back from a conference. The train was sold out, which is a sentence that ten years ago I would have said about a Beyoncé concert and not about a sleeper train, and I think that is the interesting part of the story.

European night trains, by 2010, had been declared dead so many times that it had stopped being news. The German national railway, Deutsche Bahn, withdrew from the night-train market in 2016. The French national railway closed its last domestic night line in 2017. The conventional wisdom was that the night train had been killed, finally, by the budget airline.

The conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong, or at least premature. By 2026, there are seventeen regular night-train routes operating across continental Europe, with three more announced for next year. The 9:42 from Zurich to Amsterdam is a Nightjet, run by the Austrian national railway, which has quietly become the most interesting passenger-rail operator in the world.

Why the night train came back

A combination of three things, none of them dramatic. The first is climate, which generated political appetite for funding sleeper trains as an alternative to short-haul flights. The second is policy, which followed the appetite: France banned domestic flights on routes where a train alternative under two and a half hours exists. Spain has begun a similar process. Germany has rejoined the night-train market through partnerships with the Austrians and the Swedes.

The third is the surprisingly favorable economics of sleeper trains once you stop trying to compete with budget airlines on price and start competing with hotels on convenience. A Nightjet sleeper cabin from Zurich to Amsterdam, with two berths, runs about €280. A budget flight on the same route is about €120, plus another €180 for a hotel at either end, which you would otherwise need. The numbers, for a thoughtful traveler, are competitive. For a traveler who also values not arriving at an airport at 4:30 in the morning, they are favorable.¹

The night train came back not by competing with airlines on price, but by competing with hotels on convenience.

What this looks like for an American

I am aware that I have just written four paragraphs about a transportation mode that effectively does not exist in the United States. Amtrak has one functioning network of long-distance sleeper trains, and it is, with great affection, a hobbyist’s experience rather than a serious transportation option. The Coast Starlight is a beautiful object that nobody actually uses to get anywhere.

There is, however, a real question worth asking, which is: are there American city pairs where a night train would actually work? The honest answer, for the most part, is no — American cities are too spread out, the rail infrastructure is owned by freight companies who do not particularly want passenger trains, and the political will is not there. But there are a few pairs where the math is interesting. Chicago to Minneapolis. Chicago to Washington, D.C. Los Angeles to the Bay Area, if California ever finishes its high-speed-rail project. Atlanta to Washington. These are corridors where the trip is six to nine hours, which is the sweet spot for sleeper economics.

I am not particularly optimistic about American night rail. I am, however, surprisingly interested in the fact that the European night train, which by every conventional metric should have stayed dead, did not. Sometimes a technology does come back. Usually it comes back because the conditions that killed it changed, and the conditions that killed European sleeper trains — cheap short-haul flights, no climate policy, no political appetite — have changed quite a lot.

On the train itself

The train, by the way, was lovely. The sleeper cabin was small and well-organized in the European way. Mira and I had a glass of wine in the dining car, watched the Rhine valley go by in the last of the light, and then read in our bunks until we fell asleep. We woke up to a member of the train staff knocking gently on the door with two coffees and two croissants, somewhere in the Dutch countryside, with the sun coming up. The whole experience cost what a mid-range hotel in central Amsterdam would have cost, and it was, by a significant margin, the most pleasant overnight transportation I have used in years.

If you are in Europe with any reason to go between two cities that are six to twelve hours apart, take the night train. The night train is, against my expectations and most of the trade press from a decade ago, back.