The quiet return of the night train
For thirty years the sleeper carriage was treated as a relic, shunted to the end of the timetable and then off it altogether. The economics never worked, the argument went, and nobody wanted to spend a night sitting up in a cold compartment when a budget flight cost less than dinner.
That argument is now quietly falling apart. Bookings on overnight services between the Baltic capitals and central Europe have risen for four consecutive seasons, and the operators who kept a handful of carriages in storage are finding they cannot refurbish them quickly enough to meet demand.
We assumed we were maintaining a museum. It turns out we were maintaining a backlog.
The reasons are less romantic than the coverage suggests. Rolling stock that was written down decades ago is cheap to run. Track access charges at night are a fraction of daytime rates. And the passenger who once compared a sleeper to a flight is now comparing it to a flight plus two airport transfers, a night in a hotel, and a morning lost to queuing.
What has not changed is the infrastructure. Platforms long enough for a full consist are scarce, border crossings still add an hour that timetabling cannot absorb, and the staff who know how to run an overnight service are approaching retirement without obvious replacements.
Whether the revival survives contact with those constraints is the question nobody in the sector will answer on the record. The carriages are coming back. The night train, as a system rather than a nostalgia product, is a harder thing to rebuild.