We have taken a night train exactly once. It was memorable.
We have taken a night train exactly once. It was memorable, and none of that is the train's fault.
Picture the compartment. Three small children asleep in a stack. Five sets of skis wedged along the wall like scaffolding, five pairs of boots, five helmets, and the enormous bag nobody will admit to packing. Underneath it all, two adults quietly congratulating themselves, because we had a whole hour to make the change in Hamburg. A whole hour.
We woke up because the train had stopped. Trains stop all night. This one had stopped in Hamburg.
The clocks had gone forward while we slept — Europe still does this on the last Sunday in March, precisely the weekend everybody comes home from skiing — and our hour had been repossessed at two in the morning without anyone waking us to discuss it.
Anders went down that platform like a man carrying an entire hardware shop. Skis under one arm, boots swinging from the other, helmets riding the suitcase, a child attached to one leg, trousers still forming an opinion. Behind him came the rest of us, moving the poles in relays. We have wished ever since that we had a photograph. Though if we had stopped to take one, we would still be standing in Hamburg.
We have driven to the Alps plenty of times since. The car has never once left without us, which we appreciate. It has also never made us dinner, never put three children to bed, and never handed us a morning in a city we hadn't just spent nine hours driving through.
So here is the case for the train. Not the sensible case — the good one.
A hotel room that goes somewhere while you're inside it. You get on in the evening in one country, eat dinner in front of an extremely good window, fold a bed out of the wall, and get off in the morning in a different one. One night, doing two jobs. You pay for it once.
Everyone agreed for fifteen years that the night train was finished. It turned out not to be listening. There are around 205 sleeper routes running in Europe today — more than at any time since we were the ones being carried across that platform.
Everything below is Europe, which is where the sleeper map is densest and where a bed can be priced in about a minute.
Asia runs the same idea on a bigger scale — India, China, Vietnam, Japan — and the long-distance sleepers of North America are their own kind of trip again. Each gets a page in its own right later on.
Nightjet is the one that never gave up. Austria's railway has the widest network there is: Vienna, Innsbruck and Salzburg out to Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Zurich, Basel, Venice, Florence, Rome and Milan, then on into Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary. Ask for the new-generation trains — they have a room for one person that locks from the inside and costs less than a hotel.
European Sleeper was started by two men with a spreadsheet and a crowdfunding page, which is not how railways normally begin. Brussels and Amsterdam to Berlin and Prague, a Paris–Berlin service, Italy on the way.
Scandinavia to the continent came back from the dead. Snälltåget runs Stockholm–Copenhagen–Berlin, and the Berlin–Hamburg–Stockholm EuroNight runs several times a week each way. It is the direct descendant of the train we overslept on, and we'd get on it tomorrow.
Finland runs the strangest one, and possibly the best. Helsinki to Lapland overnight, double-decker sleepers, cabins with their own shower, and a wagon at the back for your car. You fall asleep in a capital city and wake up above the Arctic Circle.
The Alps, in winter. The Travelski Night Express leaves Paris in the evening and puts you at the foot of a French ski area in time to ski before lunch, and it runs from the Netherlands and Belgium as well. Had it existed for us, there would have been one fewer connection available to sleep through.
Britain keeps two survivors — the Caledonian Sleeper up to Scotland, the Night Riviera down to Cornwall — and both leave London late enough that you can have dinner first.
And the long thin dream: north to south on one ticket. Honestly, it's one pass rather than one ticket. An Interrail Global Pass covers 33 countries with no upper age limit, and nothing stops you taking it from Sweden to Sicily. What it won't buy you is the bed — night trains want a reservation on top, every time.
A seat is the cheapest. We'd take one for four hours, not ten.
A six-berth couchette is a padded bunk with a sheet, a pillow, a lockable door and five other people. It's a lottery. First prize is a family from Kraków who will not stop offering you their sandwiches. Second prize snores.
A four-berth is the same lottery with better odds and room to sit up properly. A sleeper is a bedroom: beds made up, a basin in the compartment, and on the newer trains a shower of your own. And the mini cabin, new on Nightjet, is a locking capsule with a real bed for one person — the first time in decades a railway has taken solo travellers seriously.
Breakfast arrives at the door on a tray. Bikes go in the racks. Skis go with you, as we are uniquely positioned to confirm.
Spans, because fares move with demand and with how early you show up. A six-berth couchette usually lands between €40 and €70 a person. A four-berth is a little above. A bed in a two-berth sleeper runs €80 to €150 each. A compartment to yourself starts near €150. Sitting up all night is cheaper again, and worth it only on the short routes.
If you're travelling on an Interrail pass, budget for a reservation on top of it on every night train. The pass buys the journey. It has never once bought the bed.
For scale: in most of the cities these trains run between, €50 buys a hostel bunk that stays exactly where you left it all night. Against a flight plus a hotel plus two airport transfers, the night train is a bargain. Against a budget flight on its own, it isn't. Which comparison is honest depends on whether you were going to be asleep somewhere that night anyway — and you were.
Book early. Sales open 180 to 360 days ahead, and the cheap beds go months before the train fills up. That habit alone is the difference between a €50 couchette and a €120 one.
Book direct with the operator. The big booking sites often can't sell beds at all, only seats — which is how people end up sitting bolt upright through Bavaria under the firm impression that they'd reserved a bedroom.
Ask for a lower berth. Same price, and no ladder at three in the morning. And take one bag each. We're not going to pretend we arrived at this rule gently.
This is the part that never shows up in a price comparison. You can stand up whenever you like. Walk to the restaurant car. Read for two hours without folding your knees under a tray table. Watch a country go past instead of the back of a seat. Nobody weighs your bag, and nobody turns off a sign to tell you when you may use the toilet.
It is also, quietly, why trains are having a moment. Europe has spent a decade putting the routes back, and the people filling them aren't only the ones counting their emissions. They're the ones who noticed that on a train the journey stops being the toll you pay for the holiday and turns back into part of it.
For the ten seconds after you lift the blind. There are mountains where last night there were fields. Somebody is selling coffee on a platform in a language you didn't fall asleep in. You haven't queued, taken off your shoes or looked at a departure board since yesterday evening, and it isn't nine o'clock yet.
Flying turns a journey into a gap you have to survive. A night train hands you the distance and lets you sleep through the boring part. You step off in the middle of a city, on foot, with the whole day ahead of you and nothing behind you but a country you crossed in your pyjamas.
Take a night at either end. Sleepers leave late and arrive early, and one hotel night turns a scramble into a holiday. → Find a hotel
Stay somewhere of your own when you arrive. For when a week beats two nights. → Find a house or apartment
Get a car for the bit the railway never reached. The train ends where the good roads start. → Compare car hire
Find something to do at eight in the morning, while the room isn't ready. → Find something to do
Come back a different way. Nothing says the return leg has to be a sleeper too. → Compare trains and flights
And decide which country to wake up in. The bed is the easy part. → Find your destination
We earn nothing from any of these. They are simply where the trains are, and it costs nothing to look at a timetable.
None of these are reasons not to go. They're the things that separate a good night on a train from a long one, and they all take five minutes to check.
So pick two cities you'd like to wake up between, and see what a couchette between them costs eleven months out. It takes four minutes, and it's how most night train journeys begin — not with a plan, but with somebody discovering the train exists.
If you book one of these, or try one, or talk yourself out of one — we would like to hear about it. Drop us a line.
— Birgitta & Anders
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Not deals or destinations — methods. House sitting, night trains, repositioning cruises, and what each one really costs.
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