Swap emissions for legroom
Climate-conscious travelers skip planes, spurring revival of sleeper trains in Europe
After being gently rocked awake in her sleeper cabin, Sarah Marks spent the morning of her 29th birthday watching the Alps zip past the windows of her overnight train to Zurich.
“The train comes in right next to the lake, with the mountains coming up behind it,” Marks said wistfully. “Very romantic, I have to say.”
By the time of that 2022 journey from Zagreb, Croatia, it had been four years since she had taken a flight — since around the time Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began to spread the term “flygskam,” or flight shame.
They join an increasing number of climate-conscious Europeans, particularly younger travelers, who are shunning carbon-spewing airplanes in favor of overnight trains. In the process, they’ve spurred something of a night-train revival while discovering what many say is a slower, richer way of traveling, one that had been on the edge of extinction.
“Being able to fall asleep in one city and wake up maybe even in another country, it’s amazing to me,” said Marks, a Londoner who grew up flying several times a year. “When I switched the plane for the train, it was a no-brainer because, also, this is a superior experience.”
Though still a niche and relatively pricey market, demand for sleeper trains is increasing. The online platform Trainline said overnight bookings in 2023 rose 147% compared to 2019, the year before the pandemic. And a climate survey by the European Investment Bank found that 62% of respondents supported a ban on short flights.
Governments have begun to reinvest in overnight trains as they search for ways to meet targets to reduce carbon emissions by 2030.
The European Commission selected three new night routes in a pilot program aimed to support cross-border travel, including some ambitious private startups.
Sleeper trains never completely disappeared, particularly in Eastern Europe, but advocates say they suffered years of underinvestment while budget airlines sold tickets for a fraction of the cost.
National railways pivoted resources to high-speed daytime rail, and governments promoted more short-haul air travel by expanding airports and mostly exempting jet fuel from taxes.
The supposed death knell for sleeper
trains arrived when Germany’s Deutsche Bahn shuttered its remaining overnight routes in 2015.
But the turnaround began almost immediately. Austria’s railway, ÖBB, gambled on night trains by buying all of Germany’s sleeper carriages. They renovated the cars, rebranded the service Nightjet and applied cost-saving lessons from the airline industry. Now, Nightjet runs 22 international sleeper routes, mostly in Central Europe but extending from Vienna to Paris and Hamburg to Rome.
In December, Nightjet began rolling out 33 new seven-car trains, complete with room key cards, cellphone-permeable windowpanes for better photos and digital
thermostats in each compartment.
The success of Nightjet showed other national railways that sleeper trains were worth upgrading, advocates say. In 2023, for instance, the Czech and Hungarian railways began refurbishing their sleeper cars, and national operators in Italy and Finland signed contracts for new ones.
Private companies also are stepping in to fill gaps in service. European Sleeper launched last year — partially relying on crowdfunding — with service from Brussels to Berlin via Amsterdam, and extended the line to Prague in May. The European Commission selected the company’s plans for an Amsterdam-to-Barcelona route among its pilot projects.