GAINING SPEED
Not exactly the Orient Express, but Europe’s sleepers are back
Romanticised by movies like Murder on the Orient Express and From Russia With Love, sleeper trains had all but disappeared in Europe. Now, some of their magic is being revived - with a modern twist.
In the last century, nocturnal trains with their wood-panelled cabins and plush lounges were the stuff of adventure, chugging along through the night from Paris to Istanbul or London to Venice. But as high-speed rail connections shrank distances, lowbudget airlines emerged and European Union regulations made night trains economically untenable, sleepers lost their allure. One by one, Europe’s great rail lines terminated or dramatically cut international night-train services.
Now, with environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s ‘flight shaming’ making people more aware of their carbon footprint, the night-train industry is seeing a renaissance. It’s luring a new class of traveller - not the small but wealthy group of people of leisure who travelled on opulent trains like the Orient Express, but ordinary business people and tourists with a climate conscience.
That’s heartening news for Siemens AG engineer Paul Winkler, who’s been building trains for 27 years and believed he’d never again make another sleeper train car for western Europe. “We were at a point where I thought, it’s over,” he said. “People were switching to planes and high-speed day trains. Popular connections were shut down.”
The service between Zurich and Madrid ended in 2013. Connections between Germany and Amsterdam, Denmark and Paris were halted in 2014. Italy’s Trenitalia stopped its Rome-Paris service in 2015. In 2016, Deutsche Bahn AG ended its sleeper service, while France’s SNCF terminated a dozen night trains. That’s left Europe with a rolling stock of sleeper carriages well over 30 years old, used mostly for domestic routes.
Now, breathing new life into the business for Siemens is a US$221mn order from Austria’s Oesterreichische Bundesbahnen-Holding AG. OeBB, as it’s known, is western Europe’s only rail service to not just buck the trend but to take sleeper trains up a notch.
On Monday, Siemens started making 13 new night trains for OeBB at its factory in Vienna's Simmering district. Carriages that’ll give sleeper cars their first major design overhaul in six decades will be ready for testing by late next year.
The new cabins designed by London-based industrial studio PriestmanGoode are inspired not by the Orient Express but by the first-and-business class compartments of airlines and minimalist hotels like Premier Inn’s ZIP or Starwood Capital’s Yotel.
“We’ve tried to bring a more domestic feeling to the experience; thought about what environment people are experiencing at home, in hotels, bars, or restaurants,” said Kirsty Dias, a designer at the studio.
Austria, located at the continent’s centre and cursed with second-tier airports, never gave up on night trains. OeBB bought coaches Deutsche Bahn was retiring and took over routes such as Hamburg-Zurich and Zurich-Berlin.
Its night-train passenger numbers are set for a ten per cent gain this year. Some links like ViennaZurich have grown more than 20 per cent. The company has revived its Vienna-Venice link. In January, it’s starting a Vienna-Brussels connection for travellers to the EU’s de-facto capital. Four German lawmakers are now clamouring for a BerlinBrussels link, which OeBB could serve in cooperation with Deutsche Bahn.
Greta’s home country of Sweden is preparing a public tender for new overnight services to other European countries, after passenger numbers on northbound night trains from Gothenburg and Stockholm to the Arctic rose 43 per cent from their low point in 2014. In November, Norway's Railway Directorate recommended boosting night-train capacity. The Swiss are considering reintroducing their wagon-lits ended in 2009. Trenitalia, which has kept domestic night trains, is spending US$335mn on new locomotives and refurbishments.
EU rules meant to make train services better and cheaper are at least partly to blame for the past retreat of cross-border sleeper trains. Rail companies, which used to provide trains free cross-country track access, began charging for it after the EU pushed for greater competition. The fee hit night trains hard because they travel longer distances and carry fewer passengers per car.
“A separate charge for night trains, which could be lower, could make quite a difference for crossborder trains,” said Dick Dunmore, an associate at Steer Group, a consultancy that wrote a 2017 study on sleepers for the European Parliament.
Train travel in Europe has become unreasonably expensive and is often inefficient, according to Julia Herr, an Austrian lawmaker who arrived a day late at the climate summit in Madrid this week because her night train from Vienna to Zurich was three hours late, resulting in missing her connecting train.
“Flying is very energy intensive, but the externalities generated by fuel consumption aren’t reflected in the cost of the flight,” said Thomas Sauter-Servaes, a transportation expert at Switzerland’s ZHAW School of Engineering. That includes the carbon footprint of airlines. A Paris-Venice flight generates about 105kg of CO2 per passenger compared with about 29.4kg by train.