A revived Paris-to-Berlin sleeper leads Europe\u2019s night-train comeback, but a Basel-to-Malmo route scrapped the same season over funding shows how hard the economics of overnight rail remain.<\/p>\n
The overnight train from Paris<\/a> to Berlin pulled out again on March 26, a route Austria\u2019s \u00d6BB had run since 2023 and abandoned over the winter once France declined to keep covering its losses, and one that a Belgian-Dutch cooperative called European Sleeper chose to pick up rather than let vanish. \u201cBuilding a network doesn\u2019t happen overnight,\u201d Chris Engelsman, the cooperative\u2019s co-founder, wrote of the relaunch<\/a>. \u201cBut step by step, we are proving that night train connections between major cities can work, for travellers and as a sustainable business.\u201d<\/p>\n The train runs through Brussels and Li\u00e8ge and, from July, on to Hamburg. It arrives into a boom the format has not seen in decades. \u00d6BB\u2019s Nightjet sleepers carried 1.5 million passengers in 2024, part of a record 511 million riders across the Austrian railway, Railway Pro reported, and a new generation of Nightjet carriages has been entering service since late 2023.<\/p>\n The comeback has a clear origin. \u00d6BB launched its Nightjet brand in December 2016, taking over overnight routes and even some of the carriages from Germany\u2019s Deutsche Bahn as DB was walking away from the sleeper business. What looked then like Austria inheriting a dying category has instead become the base of a continent-wide revival, and European Sleeper is the smaller, hungrier operator now taking on the lines the state railways drop.<\/p>\n The appeal is easy to read off a departure board. A night on a train swallows a short-haul flight and a hotel room at once, and sets a traveler down in a city center by breakfast rather than at an airport on its edge. Roughly a third of Europe\u2019s busiest short-haul routes have a rail alternative under six hours, by Greenpeace\u2019s count<\/a>, and rail is, in the European Environment Agency\u2019s phrasing, \u201cthe most efficient form of passenger transport in the EU,\u201d its emissions for a given trip a fraction of a plane\u2019s. For a traveler weighing a cramped pre-dawn budget flight against a bunk and a moving window, the case does not take much making.<\/p>\n There is also the part that makes it a vacation in its own right: a sleeper berth is a small private cabin, a bunk, a window onto the passing dark, and breakfast brought round in the morning. People book these trains for the trip itself, rather than in spite of it. Some of the revival rests on exactly that, on travelers who would sooner sleep across a border than queue at a gate, and who count the fare against a plane ticket and a hotel night together rather than against the flight alone.<\/p>\n Why the Basel to Malmo night train was scrapped<\/p>\n SBB and Germany\u2019s RDC had announced their own new sleeper the same season, from Basel to Copenhagen and Malmo, three times a week, sixteen hours end to end. The train would have left Basel at half past five in the evening and reached Malmo by half past nine the next morning, with room for some 350 passengers. RDC\u2019s chief executive, Markus Hunkel, called it \u201cthe first direct night train connection between Switzerland and Scandinavia\u201d and \u201ca comfortable, environmentally friendly, and practical way to travel overnight.\u201d <\/p>\n It never ran. <\/p>\n