Earlier this month, De Morgen published an opinion piece on a night train trip to Vienna.
As an ngo working to get more and better night trains, we were pleased - despite not too rosy experience - with Dr Glenn Lyppens' opinion piece.
Bottlenecks (long overdue) clear
In it, Lyppens recounts his trip to Vienna on the Nightjet night train of the Austrian Bundesbahen (ÖBB), a trip that did not leave too good an impression. Nevertheless, we welcome this piece because it shows that the problem of night trains is far from solved, contrary to what one might think after the numerous hurrah reports in recent years. Consequently, Dr Lyppens puts his finger on one of the biggest wounds: the lack of comfort that causes passengers to sleep poorly and thus makes night trains miss their purpose. Indeed, a night train journey must satisfy two needs simultaneously: to travel long distances while sleeping, which, if successful, allows one to wake up full of energy many hundreds of kilometres from where they dozed off.
Different handicaps
A night train has several handicaps compared to a day train, and one of the biggest is that if one wants this comfort, only a third to a quarter of the number of passengers can be carried in a sleeping car compared to a carriage with seats. Moreover, a night train also requires more staff and a whole team to make the beds, keep the toilets and showers clean, serve the breakfasts and guarantee safety at night, almost all of which is paid for at the night fare, of course. So a night train is a nice but tricky product, a train and hotel at the same time.
Coaches not at the level they should be.
Latest carriages from 1999
But the problem most experienced by travellers is the condition of the rolling stock on night trains as Dr Lyppens points out. This is definitely not at the level it should be. In Europe, in the second half of the 20th century, a distinction was made between sleeping cars and sleeping coaches. Couchettes have minimal comfort: they are padded benches on which one can lie completely flat but on which one can hardly turn around because of very narrow and where one usually cannot sit upright. Indeed, there are usually three berths ("couchettes") hanging one above the other on both walls of the compartment, leaving little space even without luggage. Passengers share a pair of washbasins at the end of the corridor. A sleeping car is a lot better: there are rarely more than three people and even though some sleeping cars also have these three beds above each other, these beds are usually wider anyway and in any case each compartment has its own washbasin.
Meanwhile, the most recent sleeping cars in Europe date from 1999, a time when air conditioning was only an option, and the situation is hardly any better for sleeping cars: after 2001, only a handful of small series were built for the handful of domestic night trains running in the larger European countries, often almost unique pieces that contain a bunch of errors due to the lack of standardisation.
Comfort, however is possible
However, there were two major exceptions to this: until the start of the covid pandemic, a train ran once a week from Moscow to Paris and back. A similar train commuted weekly between Moscow and Nice. A two-night-and-a-day route right across Europe, and to make it attractive, the Russian railways had had brand-new sleeping cars built in Austria with all the comforts one would expect. They had really wide, soft beds on which one could turn around as much as one wanted on such a long journey, on which one could sit upright, with a washbasin in each compartment and whether the train was stationary or flying along the European tracks at two hundred and thirty kilometres an hour with inside quietly swell as in a soft cocoon, unhampered by chinks or a thunderous door. A night train as it should be in the year 2023!
Nightjet has also ordered 231 new carriages from the same factory, we hope they achieve the same level of comfort as the Russian carriages.
Framework of profit only
The framework in which night trains operate is one of pure profit. After all, most night trains are international trains, a sector that has long been fully liberalised and operates without government intervention. In theory, a night train could be recognised as a public service and subsidised - there is a European directive for that - but in practice this is virtually impossible because all countries crossed have to agree and subsidise in proportion to the distance the train travels in that country. That way, the journey between midnight and six o'clock in the morning is completely uninteresting because nobody gets on or off then and that train only generates costs for the country crossed at that time, not for tourists or business people who spend money.
Moreover, the European directive recognising international public services is interpreted differently by each country, leaving ''making a profit'' as the only reason to put in a night train, and given the handicaps described above, that is therefore almost impossible. No profit means no investment, and that results in the decades-old coaches Dr Lyppens describes.
Tackle the root of problems. A minimum network is crucial!
We with our association therefore call for tackling the root of the problem and creating a different framework at European level for international trains, such as, for example, the model applied by many European countries at domestic level but at European level.
In it, the EU would work out a minimum supply of international day and night trains alongside which additional market-driven trains could still compete. That minimum network could either be contracted out through public tenders or allocated directly to national operators. This is a political discussion in which we do not take sides, but the unbridled market forces of the past 15 years have meanwhile shown the need for a minimum of planning! So we get trains that are in tune with each other. Intra-European borders and economies of scale would also make it possible to build better and cheaper sleeping cars, twenty-first-century cars like those on Russian trains to France.
UK comes back from liberalisation
The UK has also come to this conclusion: the 2021 Williams Shapps plan commissioned by the UK government explicitly calls for ''a guiding mind'' for British railways, and for a à nother way of liberalisation in which a public institution decides again which trains run and at what price. Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Italy have such a system, and they are all countries with excellent railways that do not put a hole in the passenger or government budget at all.
It is time for the EU to turn its words on sustainability into deeds and face up to the fact that the current system is not working. We want better trains than we had before, and the current method of liberalisation has certainly not provided that.