The advances of high-speed rail and budget airlines once threatened to leave night trains mothballed in sheds. But award-winning rail writer Monisha Rajesh explains why travelling after dark is once again capturing travellers’ affections.
Stripping down to nothing more than base layers and boots, I slid into a booth whose brass fixtures were covered in twists of seasonal tinsel. Steamed up from the heat of bodies gathered in the dining car, the windows were sprayed with snow and I could just make out the Finnish capital gliding by outside.
A waitress placed down two plates of piping hot meatballs and mash. Together, my children and I tucked in, enjoying the warmth and surrounding clamour. It was a few days before Christmas and we were on board the Santa Claus Express from Helsinki to Rovaniemi in the heart of Finnish Lapland.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure – riding a double-decker beauty of a sleeper train with green livery and the beaming face of Father Christmas painted on the side. Next to us was a family watching Elf dubbed into Portuguese and a couple from Seoul were sipping beers and sharing a cup of bendy frankfurters.
The atmosphere was that of a pub on New Year’s Eve. It reminded me how much I adored the community of dining cars: the beating heart of a night train, where passengers come together for the feeling of belonging, content to stare out of windows, play chess and listen to the chatter of strangers.
As more families arrived, we reluctantly gave up the table and retired to our cosy compartment with wide berths, underfloor heating and en-suite facilities. Once the kids were asleep, I pulled down a seat by the window and watched as ink-black lakes gleamed through the darkness, snow billowing at the glass. In more than 16 years of travelling the world by train, I concluded that this was one of the finest passenger sleepers I’d ever experienced – smooth and silent.
A new appreciation for slow travel
Our journey into the Arctic Circle was one of many sleeper trains that I was testing out as research for my latest book, Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train. Since 2010, when I travelled around India in 80 trains, I’ve been in thrall to long-distance journeys. I subsequently spent eight months journeying around the world in 80 trains in 2015 – and wrote books about both adventures.
But night trains always held a special allure for me. However, at this time, Europe’s sleeper trains were fighting against the advances of high-speed rail and budget airlines – a losing battle that saw them all but shunted off into sheds by the end of 2016. Then Covid hit – bringing with it a wave of existential angst about the way we travel – and private companies began to emerge with the purpose of bringing back these trains as travellers realised they were once again yearning for the charms of this bygone era.
The reasons were threefold: some travellers were too nervous to fly, preferring trains thanks to the safety of private compartments, the freedom to wander the aisles and the luxury of wide, open windows. Others were shaken awake by the climate crisis, realising that they needed to change the way in which they moved through the world. Then there were those who saw the benefits of adopting a slower, more mindful mode of transport.
Of course, train travel is not a trend, since long-distance railway journeys have always embodied the essence of slow, thoughtful travel. But trains captured the zeitgeist following the pandemic, with Interrail noting record years in 2022 and 2023, and sleeper trains seeing a surge in bookings as Austria’s Nightjet expanded its fleet and its routes.
Many passengers, no doubt, were captivated by the chance to immerse themselves in a culture from the moment they set foot on board. I experienced the immediacy of dropping into your destination while on an adventure in Vietnam. Here I boarded the Reunification Express service which – after the line was severed during the Vietnam War and the tracks destroyed – started running again in 1976.
From the moment I hopped on board in Hanoi, I felt part of the landscape as the train squeezed through the backs of houses and ran parallel with the highway, lorry drivers and cyclists glancing sideways as we sped out of the capital. From behind a lace-curtained window, I could smell the scent of earth as rain lashed at the glass, hear the sounds of children clattering up the aisles and watch chefs hosing down pans in the shadows of alleys.
During the daytime, I was privy to the intricacies of other people’s lives; as night fell, I slept as the train shook and juddered down the backbone of the country, plaster flaking off the walls, a leaky sink sending a stream winding down the corridor outside. Built in the late 19th century, Vietnam’s railways are rarely polished and perfect, but therein lies their charm.
Waking to the wail of local music, I moved to the window as banana leaves slapped at the glass, the morning heat at its peak. By plane, I never would have seen the lines of drying laundry as we thumped through the jungled landscape or witnessed the explosion of ocean between Hue and Da Nang. And in the absence of uncomfortable, upright seats on planes, I was also well-slept, holding fresh tea, watching farmers hack at crops and chatting to my fellow passengers about where to eat, where to stay and where to have silk jackets made in Hoi An.
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Cups of tea and community on board
Much of my onward travels in Vietnam were shaped by my fellow passengers’ suggestions on that iconic sleeper train – and this shared community of onboard travel experts is a wonderful aspect of journeying by train that’s replicated the world over, but particularly on sleeper trains.
On a daytime service, the focus is largely on getting from one destination to another, with the idea of killing time still at the forefront of our minds. Conversation is usually restricted to pleasantries. But boarding a night train unites passengers under one shared experience, as travellers come together to form a train family of sorts for the duration of the journey, turning the compartment into a confessional, a therapist’s office or a platform for political debate.
On the Norrland night train from Narvik to Stockholm, I learnt about a Brooklyn couple’s engagement, their fear of Trump and the shocking rents in Manhattan, while at the same time chatting to a table of Swedish school teachers who drew a map on a napkin to show me where best to see the aurora in Abisko National Park, when to avoid crowds while cross-country skiing in Kiruna and how to eat tubes of Kalles – a popular sandwich spread made from roe.
It was as though the train ride was a catalyst, carrying on in the background, swerving past woods and snow-covered fields as we sipped tea and played cards, sharing a moment of communal living.
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Recapturing the romance of rail travel
When I set out to discover this renaissance of sleeper trains, I also retraced the original route of the Orient Express in an effort to recapture the romance of rail travel. Contrary to popular myth, it was far from a single luxury train. When it launched in 1883, it was a regular passenger service that involved numerous sets of rolling stock and for the first six years the journey between Paris and Constantinople (now Istanbul) involved a sequence of trains and ferries.
Trains departed Paris for Vienna via Strasbourg and Munich, then ran through Budapest and Bucharest to the southern Romanian city of Giurgiu. From there, passengers were transported by ferry across the Danube to the Bulgarian city of Ruse, where a final train transferred them to Varna on the Black Sea coast, ending with a steamboat to Istanbul.
Recreating the original route – minus the steamboats – I set off from Paris on a journey that would take four nights and five trains to complete the 3600 km journey to Istanbul via Vienna, Bucharest, Ruse and Sofia. In my imagination it was a magical sweep across Europe, a seamless chop and change at grand stations with languorous stretches of time on board for me to do with as I pleased. But the reality was different, involving long waits on chilly platforms, no dining cars on board and border stops in the small hours for passport checks and baggage scans.
Yet, even with all this effort, when the final train sailed into Istanbul and the sunrise fired the lakes around us, lighting up the minarets on mosques, I felt a rush like no other. Listening to the call to prayer, I ambled along the platform in no doubt that we’re entering a new golden age of train travel – the romance of which is ours alone to discover.
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Image credits: Norrland night train photography by Marc Sethi.
