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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

#111

Post by vram22 »

Symbiote wrote: post #69
dmitriid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :) )

The best option should have one change, since there are direct trains from Stockholm to Copenhagen, and from Copenhagen to Hamburg (this train goes on the ferry). I would expect an additional change in Malmoe could reduce the cost and increase the time. If you search for "now", it's 22:52, so you may get odd connections as the journey planner tries to make an overnight journey.

>(this train goes on the ferry)

Wow, how does a train go on a ferry? A full, long train with many cars? Then the ferry would have to be that long too, which seems unlikely. Or is it that one or a few cars of the train go on each trip of the ferry, and the cars are all connected back together when back on land?

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#112

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

krn wrote: post #92

Western Europe is very different from Eastern Europe in this case. In Western Europe, low-cost flights and buses essentially won the market. But there are not as many direct flights between Central and Eastern European cities, and the roads are often not that good, either. Therefore, in any direction from Budapest overnight trains are still very popular, and in countries like Ukraine it's probably the single most imp…

The rise of Wizzair is reducing the appeal of long-distance train travel in Central and Eastern Europe. You can now fly from Budapest to certain destinations in surrounding countries for equal to or less than the price of the train if you book early or have little luggage.

Also, the launch of Polski Bus (a localized Megacoach) a few years ago means you can get between Poland and various Central European destinations for as little as 5€, again cheaper than the train.

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#113

Post by fabioborellini »

kliao wrote: post #4

Good in theory, but implementation was poor the one time I tried it. The 6-person sleeper car is extremely cramped (2 triple bunks), and with the passport checks at border crossings, it's difficult to get a good night's sleep. Personal safety and luggage theft was a concern as well. I canceled my return trip and booked a low cost flight instead. Maybe the extra funding will improve train conditions and process.

Someone else replied already along the lines of "you get what you pay for", but I found some web pages with pictures:

- The 4 or 6 person compartments (couchettes) are quite cramped indeed, but the good part is they only cost 10 or 20 euros extra compared to a plain seat. https://www.vagonweb.cz/fotogalerie/SK/WSBA_Bvcmbz.php

- The actual sleeper wagons with 1 to 3-berth compartments cost more, with their prices around a hotel stay, but are quite comfortable in my opinion. https://www.vagonweb.cz/fotogalerie/A/OeBB_WLABmz-7290.php

Sleeper trains to Scandinavia were a thing not so long ago. When German DB scrapped their CityNightLine system around year 2014, Copenhagen was being served with a sleeper train that had carriages to Basel, Amsterdam and Prague. The carriages were shunted between trains somewhere in Germany. It only takes few hours to reach Copenhagen from most inhabitated parts in Sweden - actually Copenhagen's airport is the main airport for many leisure travellers in Sweden. Nevertheless, a decade or two earlier there was a similar sleeper service that reached Stockholm.

I'm finding it hard to believe that sleeper services are not economically feasible since Europeans think of them quite fondly but of course, if they were feasible they would not have lost to discount airlines and even buses. Maybe sleeper trains could be operated more efficiently or marketed and priced more aggressively? In addition, it's currently a lot easier to buy a plane ticket than to plan a long railway journey and figure out which companies will sell the tickets.

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#114

Post by vram22 »

jnurmine wrote: post #95
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.

But wait. If you plan to travel a LOT with a train within Europe, and you are a European resident, check out the Interrail passes. For non-residents, check out Eurail instead. I've no experience with Eurail but Interrail worked fine back in the days and saved a lot of money, too. As horribly cliché as it may sound, it truly was a great eye-opening experience which made me appreciate Europe (culture, people, cuisine,…

>For non-residents, check out Eurail instead.

My cousin (Indian) had toured Europe a lot, cheaply, back in the day, on Eurail, when working for the Indian Tea Board in Brussels for 3 years.

>I've no experience with Eurail but Interrail worked fine back in the days and saved a lot of money, too. As horribly cliché as it may sound, it truly was a great eye-opening experience which made me appreciate Europe (culture, people, cuisine, geography, history, and so on) more than I did before.

Cousin said the same about the experience.

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#115

Post by detaro »

vram22 wrote: post #111
Symbiote wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best option should have one change, since there are direct trains from Stockholm to Copenhagen, and from Copenhagen to Hamburg (this train goes on the ferry). I would expect an additional change in Malmoe could reduce the cost and increase the time. If you search for "now", it's 22:52, so you may get odd connections as the journey planner tries to make an overnight journey.

>(this train goes on the ferry) Wow, how does a train go on a ferry? A full, long train with many cars? Then the ferry would have to be that long too, which seems unlikely. Or is it that one or a few cars of the train go on each trip of the ferry, and the cars are all connected back together when back on land?

The Denmark-Germany ferries on that route are ~150 m long, and fit a train of up to 100 m length (or something in that ballpark).

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:2017-08-22-ICE_TD_Puttga...

Larger ferries on other routes have multiple rails next to each other, and long trains are split up across those.

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#116

Post by iso-8859-1 »

niftich wrote: post #50

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…

Regarding the Fehmarn link, construction has just started: https://femern.com/en/News-and-press/2019/March/New-activiti...

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#117

Post by gpvos »

Xylakant wrote: post #31
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second the recommendation of Bahn.de. For like two decades now it has provided a way to search train schedules across Europe when the national rail companies didn’t bother to provide their own accessible interface.

While you can generally search trips, last time I checked you couldn’t book anything that doesn’t either start or end in Germany.

You can book some trips that go through Germany but don't actually start or end there (e.g., Amsterdam-Göteborg).

Conversely, there are some trips that are best booked online on the web site of the national railway of a third country. For example, the site of the NMBS (Belgian Railways)[0] knows about some Dutch fare reduction cards that the DB (Germany) doesn't know about, while it also knows about more German stations than the NS (Netherlands) does, so some (admittedly fairly obscure) tickets from the Netherlands to Germany can only be bought online on their site.

[0] https://www.b-europe.com/

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#118

Post by fit2rule »

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…

>Western Europe

Try Middle Europe. Take a train from Prague to Vienna to Zurich and on to Paris .. or Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, I mean if you plan things properly, its a very, very comfortable way to ride around see Europe properly: slow enough to grok the landscape.

Re: Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

#120

Post by gpvos »

robin_reala wrote: post #30
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…

There’s a coach from Oslo to Malmö. Not sure if it goes on to Copenhagen, but it’s easy enough to walk to the train platform and be at Copenhagen in 40mins.

I can't stand to be in a bus for more than about an hour and a half (or on a plane at all), while I can be in a train all day and enjoy the ride. YMMV.
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