A revived Paris-to-Berlin sleeper leads Europe’s night-train comeback, but a Basel-to-Malmo route scrapped the same season over funding shows how hard the economics of overnight rail remain.
The overnight train from Paris to Berlin pulled out again on March 26, a route Austria’s ÖBB 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. “Building a network doesn’t happen overnight,” Chris Engelsman, the cooperative’s co-founder, wrote of the relaunch. “But step by step, we are proving that night train connections between major cities can work, for travellers and as a sustainable business.”
The train runs through Brussels and Liège and, from July, on to Hamburg. It arrives into a boom the format has not seen in decades. ÖBB’s 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.
The comeback has a clear origin. ÖBB launched its Nightjet brand in December 2016, taking over overnight routes and even some of the carriages from Germany’s 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.
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’s busiest short-haul routes have a rail alternative under six hours, by Greenpeace’s count, and rail is, in the European Environment Agency’s phrasing, “the most efficient form of passenger transport in the EU,” its emissions for a given trip a fraction of a plane’s. For a traveler weighing a cramped pre-dawn budget flight against a bunk and a moving window, the case does not take much making.
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.
Why the Basel to Malmo night train was scrapped
SBB and Germany’s 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’s chief executive, Markus Hunkel, called it “the first direct night train connection between Switzerland and Scandinavia” and “a comfortable, environmentally friendly, and practical way to travel overnight.”
It never ran.
In December the Swiss parliament voted to withdraw its 10-million-franc share of the funding, and SBB, left to carry the route alone, judged it economically unviable and shelved it, The Local reported. The money “would amount to throwing public money down the drain to finance a service from which Switzerland will derive virtually no tangible benefit,” Yvan Pahud of the Swiss People’s Party had told parliament.
Why night trains are so hard to keep running
The Basel line and the Paris-Berlin Nightjet died of the same thing, a subsidy withdrawn, in consecutive seasons; one route came back under a smaller operator, and one did not. A sleeper carries fewer passengers than a daytime train and ties up its carriages overnight to do it, so the gap between the fare and the cost has usually been closed by public money, and public money is what a single parliamentary vote can switch off. France pulled its support from Paris-Berlin; Switzerland pulled its share of Basel. Even ÖBB, the railway most responsible for the comeback, has begun steering its investment toward daytime trains, where the numbers hold steadier.
That leaves the network’s growth in the hands of operators willing to run the routes a national railway will not. European Sleeper has overnight links from Brussels to Barcelona, calling at Avignon and Girona, and from Brussels to Milan drawn up for later in the year, though neither yet has a firm start date. Engelsman is betting the network into being, one route at a time, on the theory that enough of them together will finally pay.
How to book a European night train
Anyone who wants to try one should book early, because the fares are dynamic and the cheapest berths sell first. Nightjet tickets open up to six months ahead, though some routes release closer in, and the price climbs as the train fills. The choice comes down to how much privacy is worth. A reclining seat is the cheapest way aboard and the least restful; a couchette is a padded bunk in a shared compartment of six or four, breakfast included, from about 49 or 59 euros; a sleeper is a private cabin for one, two, or three people, with a washbasin as standard or a shower and toilet in the deluxe version, from roughly 89 euros for a bed in a two-berth and 129 for a single. The newest Nightjet carriages add individual pods, called mini-cabins, for solo travelers who want a door that locks without the price of a full sleeper.
Booking is simplest through the operator. ÖBB’s own site, sells Nightjet tickets without a fee, third parties like Trainline and Rail Europe carry the same trains for a small markup, and European Sleeper sells its routes through its own site. Rail-pass holders are not exempt: Interrail and Eurail travelers still need a separate paid reservation to claim a berth, and those fees are dynamic too, running from a few euros to a great deal more on a busy night in a private cabin.
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