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Comment by csmuk | Hacker News Reader

My one experience of a sleeper (London-Scotland) was horrid. Farts, sick, snoring, alcohol noises and smells all night.

I hope things are better on the mainland. If not, I'd rather take a plane.

I flew back from Glasgow to Stansted for a small fortune to avoid the experience.

I've taken this route a couple of times - the Caledonian sleeper. I had this romantic vision of linen tablecloths and breakfast in bed.

Instead, I got instant coffee and a single croissant served in a vacuum-packed plastic wrapper.

One time, the train even ended up in a Glasgow by mistake.

Croissant! Lucky soul. They had supply problems when I went on it. We had Fosters and microwaved burger for breakfast. Not a great start to the day.

It became apparent at about 11AM that the burger was poison and tried (unsuccessfully I will add) to escape both ends. Sorry if that was too much information.

Oh, we'd have killed for Fosters. All we got was half a cup of brake fluid, and if we said anything the engine driver would stop the train "until everyone was quiet". Then we took a wrong turn at Crewe and ended up in Archangelsk twelve days later with beriberi.

Was is 12? Seemed like 13.

At least the brake fluid was fresh.

I had a window seat, but all I could see was despair. Turns out it was my reflection.

The small lady in the paper hat was nice, but she ran out of cookies before she got to me.

Cookies? Ridiculous! They fed us burning hot coal, then forced us to pull the train while the driver sat up front and whipped us. And we had to pay train driver to let us pull!

Poisoned burger? Luxury. We were served dingy water reclaimed from the train radiator and a pigeon what had flown against a window and died, and told to fend for ourselves. At night a drunken conductor would thrash us all to sleep with a broken bottle of Glenfiddich, shouting various slurs.

I take the London-Edinburgh sleeper fairly regularly, and have only ever had good experiences.

That said, although in theory standard-class passengers have to share, this has only ever happened to me once. I can imagine that if you drew the short straw it could be terrible.

The other big down-side is that you can't have a proper wash on the train; luckily there are some pretty good public swimming baths between Waverley station and our client's offices.

Somewhat off-topic - I found EasyJet to be a cheap alternative to trains going from London to Edinburgh. RyanAir is another one, though they have a reputation of claiming to fly you to one city, only to land in a different one because its airport fees are slightly cheaper [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair#Alleged_misleading_adve...

Ha! We flew from Paris to Dublin a couple of years ago, but the "Paris" airport was actually in Beauvais, about 80 km north of Paris. The bus ride from Paris to the airport both took longer and cost more than the flight to Dublin.

When I flew with them to spain a few years back, their Barcelona airport was in Girona (105 km away, according to Google maps).

"though they have a reputation of claiming to fly you to one city, only to land in a different one because its airport fees are slightly cheaper"

Well, even though I dislike Ryanair, their information on that aspect is as good as it gets.

They advertise "Paris Beauvais" airport which, ok, is not known by many people but I'm not sure how they could do it better.

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