Midnight Trains – A Hotel on Rails
midnight-trains.com
midnight-trains.com
EDIT: ok, found it (under "our story"):
> In 2024 we will launch the first line from our Paris hub. This will lay the foundation for our ambitious plan to create a network of more than 10 destinations, each between 800 and 1,500 km from Paris.
A uniform
Special tools to check the tickets and operate locks
An ID
I don't know where you live but the idea that people would impersonate a conductor(1) to get your passports is something out of a James Bond movie.
1) they would also need to incapacitate the real conductor(s) beforehand.
There were many times when conductors were not observing me. Has that changed?
Your fantasy scenario conveniently omits the part where on a night train where you have booked a special compartment with beds and you are crossing borders you can put up a uniform, access the locked wagon-lits cars of the trains, get my passport, get back to the rest of the train, change back, drop off at the next station.
(Hint: the cars with bed compartments are separated by the ones with seats, you access these by showing the tickets to the same uniformed guy who would get your passports and wake you up later, and also night trains do not stop anywhere for hours - stops at the border are as short as possible, and passengers are not allowed to leave the train: for wagon lits the controller will take care of the passports, while people in the normal cars will be checked by the police)
The whole point of taking your passports at the start is to save you being wakened by the border police, so you can sleep for the whole trip.
And for the same reason, wagon lits are locked so that regular passengers cannot get there and disturb you, or try to evade police at the border.
And when you arrive in the middle of nowhere, you have your own car and all your luggages. Beats flying and then taking a cab or renting a car big times.
Doesn't work across oceans though.
I'd love to see more of those types of options, personally.
I used to commute from Bay area and Colorado on the Amtrak to visit family back in SoCal, it has it's charm: I had thought about doing a cooking tour show with a private couch/kitchen model highlighting local produce and cuisine all over the US.
but to be honest, after the 2nd time it was incredibly loathsome experience: it takes way longer than is worth if you value your time and it's incredibly prone to delays that might make your transfers not be there. I got stuck in New Mexico with 20 other people because of some issue with the bus we needed to take to get to the next train and we sat in a run-down town in Raton for 11 hours waiting for someone from Amtrak to sort out our itinerary. Suffice it to say, I'll take Frontier's cramped flight any day unless I seriously have nothing else going on for a few weeks and can enjoy the leisurely pace than trains were meant to be enjoyed as.
Especially when you see how long it takes ÖBB and other train companies to get receive their trains they announced years ago.
Curious to see how this will work out. More night train and night train competition is always good and healthy.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the fast, no-fuss refund of 25% when our return trip was delayed for 65 minutes. After alighting, on the next train, I arranged for the €80 to be refunded in just five minutes of entering the relevant details through their chat bot.
I'm unsure if these are refurbished old cars or completely new ones though.
It doesn't help when major OEBB tenders end up in court due to someone allegedly screwing up a digital signature:
https://www.railjournal.com/fleet/obb-set-to-retender-withdr...
Came to these comments to figure it out. The following important bit should be more obvious.
> In 2024 we will launch the first line from our Paris hub. This will lay the foundation for our ambitious plan to create a network of more than 10 destinations, each between 800 and 1,500 km from Paris.
But it’s potentially not quite as luxe as you’re imagining; for example, nearly all of the carriages are original 20s stock which means no showers.
> What do I wear on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express train?
You can never be overdressed on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express train! For dinner, we ask for formal evening attire and many guests like to don black tie and wear their most glamorous finery for the occasion. Smart daywear is appropriate during the day. At lunch, for example, a jacket/tie or equivalent is suitable. Jeans are not acceptable at any time.
Mustaches, monocles and pocket watches are probably desirable too, although I'm not sure you would get a rebate if you have one...
Bathtubs?
The carriages are more of an old-world luxury experience: the cabin that my spouse and I stayed in had incredibly intricate, hand-inlayed wood and lacquer decoration, for example. If you're expecting a shower and a high-def LCD television etc. then no, that is not what you're getting.
The service, which is the item that really is the distinguishing factor in luxury travel, was superior. The one part that was a let-down on the journey is that you have to switch to a coach (admittedly a nice one) for the actual crossing of the English Channel via the tunnel.
That said, the actual choice for Paris-Rome by train is to take the Paris-Milan TGV trains with the french SNCF or the italian Trainitalia, and then the Milan-Rome (with Trainitalia or NTV). All in all is a 20h travel for around 200-300€ (for tomorrow), probably way cheaper than this 2024 train, and around the same than most plane tickets (but you can find "cheaper" planes...).
In the past, there was a night train between Paris and Milan by Thello (a Trainitalia subsidiary), but is't also closed since 2020.
The Austrian train company OEBB operate night trains under their NightJet brand[0], according to their route map[1] both Paris and Milan are served, although it doesn't look like that's direct, presumably you have to change (in Austria somewhere?)
[0] https://www.nightjet.com/ [1] https://www.nightjet.com/en/dam/jcr:6a8041cb-0131-4ad3-84fd-...
So this is a fancy website to collect emails for a service that is not even intended to launch for a couple years. I'm feeling like marketing folks these days really believe, "Market it, and they will come." But it would really help to actually have a product to sell.
Deutsch Bahn tried for years to introduce a route to London through the tunnel, but even they couldn't make it happen and gave up in the end. Eurostar's monopoly is well entrenched!
And there is, of course, a London to Edinburgh (and on to Aberdeen, etc) sleeper service already: https://www.sleeper.scot
One of the issues is that Eurotunnel requires a minimum train length, so that if a train is ever stopped in the tunnel, there will always be an emergency exit accessible without having to walk down the track. DB planned to meet the minimum length by joining two units together, but the problem is that there was no way for passengers to move between the front and rear units.
They're building custom train cars ($$$) that will generally serve people who are visitors to Paris (otherwise why would you pay extra for a hotel night on a train from a city that you live in, and not fly discount airlines instead?).
The trains will be in operation only 50% duty cycle (the train arrives in the morning, so I suppose it takes the return journey that evening and not immediate turnaround), since the outbound was 13 hours.
I'm guessing the tickets will be quite premium priced to make it profitable.
Because if you stayed at home, you have to wake up early and deal with the airport to fly on the airline. This way, you can take your time, make use of the journey for some work or relaxation and arrive fresh in the morning.
It is more expensive, though. But that's also because air travel gets lots of subsidies and doesn't pay for externalities. That should change.
For many sleeper trains already are cost effective. And as soon as governments finally give in and stop subsidising air travel it will only become more attractive.
And every train fan knows that there is one thing that can't be beat: get off the train in the early morning, take a few steps, and you're standing in front of the station and you're done. You can go visit a museum or do some other leisurely thing. No security, no delays in getting your luggage, not being stuck in airport getting ready for the train/taxi/bus to some place humans actually want to be.
So, for a short flight, using the train may take the same time than using the plane (particularly true in Europe with the speed trains).
For example, Paris-Frankfurt, next wednesday with Deutsche Bahn ICE 9553 it's 4 hours for 56€ from city center to city center (cheapest price for the week, it can go up to 350€). By plane, with Air-France it's 1h20 from airport (CDG) to airport (FRA) for 127€ the same day. From Paris center to CDG airport, it's around 30 mins, and for Frankfurt airport to Frankfurt center it's 40 minutes. Both ride by local trains (for 5~10€ each). All in all around 2h30 from city-center to city-center, but then you need to not forget the necessary time for security check & boarding. Let's say 1h30 only because you have no luggage... If you have a luggage add 40 minutes more.
All in all, for this ride, the time is around the same, but the stress is not...
I'd take the train.
Unless you actually want make sure you're on time for the meeting. Unless you are in Switzerland or Japan, if the train is supposed to arrive at 8am, the chance you'll make your 9am meeting on time is a coin toss at best, even if it's held right next to the train station.
Also the hotel is guaranteed to have a much more comfortable bed, a shower and a better breakfast.
The one thing they really need. To get right is the bed needs cannot be perpendicular to the direction of motion. That sucks.
Here in Germany, there are a lot of domestic flights under 1 hour that connect places that would be 4-6 hours away by train. Even with the inconvenience of being treated like cattle, having to travel for an hour to get to and from the airport on both ends, etc. it's still a net gain. And often it's cheaper too. And it's the difference between needing a hotel or being able to travel back and forth on a single day. Early morning and evening flights are usually packed.
Trains should be dirt cheap but they aren't. A round trip to my parents with a 4.5 hour train journey costs me around 110 Euros every time I do it. The fuel expenses for the same journey by car are about the same.
Reason: Deutsche Bahn is a state protected monopoly that has little to no real competition and is run in a super inefficient way. So companies that have to burn enormous amounts of kerosene are able to compete on price. That's insane. There are buses competing with train journeys in Germany charging 30-40% of the train ticket price. Sometimes less. Do buses have better fuel economy than trains? Of course they don't.
So, yes, these luxury trains will be drop in the ocean in terms of actually cutting down on that. I doubt they will be profitable at all. At those prices, filling the trains will be a challenge. Though there is a market for people with a conscious and a wallet that want to go places but feel bad about flying there.
France and Spain have both invested in High Speed rail. Germany is behind there, the lack of speed on their train network. For humans time is a very important consideration.
It's utterly ridiculous how much air travel is subsidized and train travel is not. Another problem is indeed that trains can't really compete with each other; even privatised, they still end up with local monopolies on specific lines, or else it would become chaos. I suppose there's some competition between high-speed rail and short flights, and sometimes, high-speed train tickets (to France at least) can get surprisingly cheap if you buy them at the right moment, but the competition remains unfair because of all the subsidies air travel gets.
Maybe EU governments should subsidise trains to the point travel becomes free. I'm sure that would cut down on traffic jams on roads too.
Tracks still is worth it, but only if you use the track a lot.
The nature is subsidizing air travel much more than any government ever could.
Most train tracks in Western Europe are continuously welded nowadays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_track#Continuous_welde...), so no "repetitive train track sounds", except at points/switches.
That's the whole point.
This company is trying the luxury angle so that people would pay more than they might for a "normal" train and therefore the business might be viable.
Lots of people do use charters and luxury trains so it might not be crazy but the difficult part will be not running too many services to cost money but not too few that they are not useful for the traveller.
https://europa.eu/year-of-rail/news/new-action-plan-boosting...
At such long distances I prefer to plan a day or so at intermediate points (like Paris in your example) to prevent delays from cascading into the whole trip. So you would have separate tickets anyway.
I realise someone who speaks only Dutch and a bit of English may be daunted by that, but there are local train travel agents who can do it for you for a modest fee.
But despite that, it was a fun, low stress experience. Especially compared to air travel.
I look forward to the day that I could take the Vancouver to Toronto train.
Side note, I did take the Stockholm to Malmo to Copenhagen night train, and I took the Bergen to Oslo night train. If there's even a bed, I would not hesitate doing that again on another vacation. If you're going to sleep in a hotel, you might as well be moving.
We hired the best "couche" room we could on the train. Normally equipped with foods, a bottle of spirits and some music.
During our travels we loved these trips. They were no frills though - Soviet era train services are very basic.
But we saved a nights accommodation every trip doing this and had great fun en route.
Tangentially, in the US south, the midnight train was once a metaphor for salvation from bondage or prison, perhaps via death, as immortalized in these lyrics by blues legend Leadbelly:
"Let the Midnight Special shine an ever-lovin' light on me"
Motorail in the UK used to be a few carriages tagged on the back of (usually) a sleeper train. There were all kinds of issues with the time it takes to load and unload safely at either end and the option to unload en-route is largely not there.
In the UK, a lot of space beside stations was also sold off so not all stations could support this any more (I guess you could build additional stops)
I think like moving freight by train, if there was a minimum level of demand, it would be worth the investment but until you invest, you don't really know what the demand is. In the UK, probably only the longest journies would be popular for taking cars by trains since most people would rather then drive for 4-5 hours than have the hassle and expense of the train journey.
Surely flying is still worst but it seems more scalable; once we get electric planes then all of a sudden planes will be more sustainable maybe?
The environmental cost Of train infrastructure is also amortised over the lifetime of the infrastructure.
There are tunnels and bridges in the UK built in the 1800s which are still transporting trains in it today.