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Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

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Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#41

Post by dmitriid »

detaro wrote: post #33
dmitriid wrote: post #18

In my limited experience trains are both ridiculously expensive and impossible to find in Europe. Let’s say I want to travel from Stockholm to Hamburg. It will cost an arm and a leg. And it will require a ridiculous amount of layovers (5 IIRC, with bus travel between some trains) if you can a website to actually plan such a route properly. It gets even more ridiculous the farther you travel.

I just plugged those two cities into the Deutsche Bahn website, and can now buy a ticket for a train leaving Stockholm in 8 hours (6:25 local time). 2 transfers (although routes exist with only one), 11:37 travel time. Saver fare still available: 99,90 € (regular would be 225 €). And it's not the only connection tomorrow. That said, your point somewhat stands: it really depends on the route if good options are availa…

Just plugged it in to SJ.se (Swedish rail). Doesn’t even have Hamburg as a selection.

So I need to somehow know that Deutsche Bahn ofers the search capability. True two to three train changes, 90 to 220 euro.

I guess I’ll use bahn.de from now on (and learn some German :) )

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#42

Post by bosie »

jasonkester wrote: post #39
avolcano wrote: post #12

Excited about this idea. I wanted to do an overnight train in a Europe trip I did last year, but the timing and quality never quite worked out. A lot of the time, trains between cities in western Europe are annoyingly long for a day trip, but slightly _too short_ for overnight trips - almost like an NYC->London red-eye, where you arrive just after you fall asleep. The couple of overnight trains I saw that seemed like…

That Venice train is great. Living near Paris, we can do a weekend in Venice with two full days on the ground but only one night in a hotel (which is handy since rooms start at around $400/night there.) It’s a shame that they killed off the dozen other night train destinations from here over the years. If Sweden and Norway open up as possibilities, I’ll be dragging the family up there the first sunny weekend.

completely off-topic but you could stay in mestre and take the very cheap train into SL; takes 11 minutes. for example Best Western Plus Hotel Bologna is right next to the station and when i went there in october was 84 euros a night...

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#43

Post by Symbiote »

avolcano wrote: post #12

Excited about this idea. I wanted to do an overnight train in a Europe trip I did last year, but the timing and quality never quite worked out. A lot of the time, trains between cities in western Europe are annoyingly long for a day trip, but slightly _too short_ for overnight trips - almost like an NYC->London red-eye, where you arrive just after you fall asleep. The couple of overnight trains I saw that seemed like…

You write "_ferry_" like it's something weird, but it's a completely normal transport option for a huge number of Europeans -- usually for longer journeys, but sometimes to cover a short distance in 20-30 minutes. There are many ferry connections across the Irish, North, Baltic and Mediterranean seas.

Ignoring the price, I'd choose an overnight ferry over an overnight train. The worst room on a ferry is probably as large as the best room on an overnight train.

The food menu for Oslo-Copenhagen is [1], the prices seem in-line with what I'd expect to pay at a restaurant in either city, though I don't know what the quality is like.

[1] https://www.dfdsseaways.co.uk/onboard-our-ferries/copenhagen...

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#44

Post by avolcano »

jasonkester wrote: post #39
avolcano wrote: post #12

Excited about this idea. I wanted to do an overnight train in a Europe trip I did last year, but the timing and quality never quite worked out. A lot of the time, trains between cities in western Europe are annoyingly long for a day trip, but slightly _too short_ for overnight trips - almost like an NYC->London red-eye, where you arrive just after you fall asleep. The couple of overnight trains I saw that seemed like…

That Venice train is great. Living near Paris, we can do a weekend in Venice with two full days on the ground but only one night in a hotel (which is handy since rooms start at around $400/night there.) It’s a shame that they killed off the dozen other night train destinations from here over the years. If Sweden and Norway open up as possibilities, I’ll be dragging the family up there the first sunny weekend.

Huh, I came _very_ close to doing it, but saw enough negative reviews to put me off. To be fair, most of them seemed to be people who had bad experiences in the shared (hostel) sleepers, though, most of which seemed to not really be the fault of the train (just lots of complaints about snoring and such, which, like, is why I always have ear plugs when I travel), but some complained about broken AC and busted toilets which sounded like... well, a normal Amtrak experience, but not something I really wanted on my vacation.

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#45

Post by leroy_masochist »

Overnight trains are awesome and I am glad they are making a resurgence but is $5.3mm really "a major shot in the arm for Europe’s night trains overall"? That's not very much money for infrastructure. Perhaps the important thing here is that the Swedes are publicly announcing that they're spending money on this, in general.

The cooler night train story is what is going on in Asia -- lots of projects in the works such as an Istanbul-Baku luxury sleeper train and major new Chinese routes such as Dushanbe-Kashgar and Lhasa-Yunnan.

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#46

Post by _delirium »

dmitriid wrote: post #41
detaro wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just plugged those two cities into the Deutsche Bahn website, and can now buy a ticket for a train leaving Stockholm in 8 hours (6:25 local time). 2 transfers (although routes exist with only one), 11:37 travel time. Saver fare still available: 99,90 € (regular would be 225 €). And it's not the only connection tomorrow. That said, your point somewhat stands: it really depends on the route if good options are availa…

Just plugged it in to SJ.se (Swedish rail). Doesn’t even have Hamburg as a selection. So I need to somehow know that Deutsche Bahn ofers the search capability. True two to three train changes, 90 to 220 euro. I guess I’ll use bahn.de from now on (and learn some German :) )

bahn.de has an English version fwiw. But yeah it's non-obvious that it's the de-facto pan-Europe rail search engine. Other European train companies generally have pretty spotty cross-border information, while DB has almost everything. Even with tickets it can't book for you, it still usually has timetables and can show you an itinerary.

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#48

Post by Scoundreller »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #27
danielfoster wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still occasionally passport checks at EU borders.

With the migration crisis, spot checks have been introduced at a few select crossings, but that still leaves plenty of possible train routes within Schengen where the authorities are not concerned about checking for migrants.

Or any excuse a Member State wants to justify their “temporary” checkpoint.

Don’t worry, MEPs won’t do anything more than talk about it.

https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/border...

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

alehul wrote: post #29
blunte wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you choose a 6 person sleeper car, you can't really expect much. It's a bit like a hostel - you choose it because it's cheap, not because you expect to get proper rest. To me, the 140EUR would be very much worth a private room, bathroom, and shower. It's travel + hotel, or some decent approximation. If you booked other forms of travel and an overnight hotel, you'd surely spend as much money and more time.

> a private room, bathroom, and shower What trains have you found that offer this? As an American unaccustomed to such trains, I'd be super interested to try them.

> > a private room, bathroom, and shower

> What trains have you found that offer this? As an American unaccustomed to such trains, I'd be super interested to try them.

Just FYI, we have those in America on Amtrak long-distance trains; the Bedroom and Bedroom Suite (on both Viewliners and Superliners) have these features, as does the Accessible Bedroom on Viewliners. Roomettes don't have the shower (or the bathroom, on Superliners.)

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#50

Post by niftich »

Sleeper trains are doing fine in Central and Eastern Europe, despite having to contend with some long running times. Sweden is trying to revive them through Denmark, which hasn't hosted night trains since 2014 [1].

There's two viable, existing routes for trains between the Central Sweden and Northern Germany. One's through the Fehmarn Belt rail ferry, and another is the long way through Jutland. Both ways take a long time compared to the distance covered. Stockholm is already ~5 hours by fast train from Copenhagen -- this segment of the journey stays the same. It's after that things get complicated and slow. Operational issues remain with changing voltages and train protection systems (ETCS Level 2 will be built out in a few years), or with the ferry.

A Fehmarn Belt fixed link would be a boon for such a service, like the article says. But it remains to be seen whether that will be built.

[1] https://back-on-track.eu/night-trains-to-europe-new-opportun...

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