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There's been talk for a while about autonomous cars driving people throughout the night across countries/states for meetings the next day. Sleeper trains already do this. Sleeper trains are making a comeback as we become more aware of the impact of flying to the environment.
The red-eye to Chicago, which is a comparable trip, really sucks because you only get about 3 hours of sleep in the most uncomfortable position imaginable. This means that you arrive in the city groggy and discombobulated.
I would even pay airfare-level prices for that kind of service. And extra if there's a way to segregate families with small children from my cabin so I don't have to try to remain asleep while a toddler is screaming for 3 hours in the same cabin.
If only the US had trains this nice... One can dream. This really looks spectacular.
Österreichische Bundesbahnen (ÖBB) took over all remaining sleepers run by Deutsche Bahn (DB) some years ago. One downside of this was the dropping of the Amsterdam–Munich sleeper — ÖBB's nexus lies in Vienna. The Netherlands currently has no sleeper trains, which is rather unfortunate, because the sleeper train appears to gaining in popularity after a period of decline. Increasingly, people want to avoid flying if r…
Timewise this would've been fine, but price is not competitive. I'm not sure if the problem is too cheap flights, or too expensive trains.
Sleeper trains make so much sense for travel over land. They are often competitively priced with air travel, they pollute a lot less and the time saved can be huge when you consider that you spend time travelling when you would otherwise be asleep (although this is sometimes true for air travel, many/most people find it difficult to get quality sleep in economy class). The London - Edinburgh sleeper train (Caledonian…
The Caledonian Express is definitely on my list of trains to travel by some day. Pretty soon (when the customs part is sorted out on the Amsterdam end) it will be possible to travel from Amsterdam to London directly on the Eurostar without transferring in Brussels, so that helps too for me as a Dutchman.
For the opposite, the most uncomfortable one to sleep in was the Hong Kong to Shanghai one. I paid extra for the Deluxe option, can't even imagine how hard the bed would have been on the lower classes. Still, was a pretty cool journey.
Makes me wonder if these Austrian train designs are already set in stone or just a proposal that might or might not happen.