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I take this train 3-4 times a year going from stockholm-luleå and it's great. You can get a 6 person cabin when travelling in a company of 4 which is great when you have small kids. This way you a whole cabin for them be pains without disturbing anybody else and it's much more of an adventure and much more cosy. I would love to have more good alternatives to travel by night trains because I really dislike airports an…
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If this helps... "In Europe alone, several new affordable options have materialized too, running more utilitarian services (no guided excursions, just overnight schedules). In 2017, the United Kingdom’s Great Western Railway (GWR) relaunched the Night Riviera, traveling between London and Cornwall, one of England’s sunniest corners. Also in 2017, Italy’s Trenitalia-owned Thello debuted new sleeper cars with en suite…
"Relaunched", at least for the two British trains, seems to mean they refurbished the carriages and issued a press release. I used both of these trains as a student (late 2000s), so I'm not convinced that they weren't affordable before the relaunch.
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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.
Sleeper cars are great—I have fond memories of travelling up the coast of Norway in 1990, as well as travelling in the seventies in Sweden with my father.
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…
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 l…
Then of course there are the local ferries like you mention. IMO, one of the best ways to visit Venice is to stay in Rovinj, Croatia and ferry over for the day.
In Sweden a flight from the northern parts to the southern is about $100 and takes an hour. The train cost $100-200 and takes about 16h depending on where you depart from.
I believe a requirement for people choosing to take the train is that they add some facilities (you feel pretty nasty after 16h on a train) and reduce the price. Raising the price on flights won’t help unless it’s drastically, around 2-300%. And if you do this on domestic flights then nobody will afford international flights.
This is a great idea. I wish we had something like this in the states.