Night-Train Chatter

 Before 2000, at least to some marginal degree....night trains ran.  You could walk into the Frankfurt train station at 11 PM and find three to four routes laid out.  One headed north to Hamburg....one south toward Munich and onto Milan.....another toward Paris....and another toward Zurich.  

Sleep cars?  They were used and generally inexpensive (not cheap, I'll say but certainly not outrageous).  

You'd typically board....get to your private cabin (big enough for two to sleep)....then walk to the restaurant car for a beer or two, and then sleep for five hours...geting up around 5 AM, and dressed to exit the car at 5:40 AM in Hamburg (I did the trip twice).  

Most transport analysts will tell you that when the 1990s arrived....low-cost airlines started operating in Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, and Hamburg.  Night train popularity decreased.  

The Bahn folks dumped the concept around five years ago.  Cost-wise and numbers-wise, it made some sense.

Obsessive people who preferred the night-train experience?  Across Germany, you could probably find 50,000 people who rode the train at least once or twice a year.  Some saw it as a social thing or unique travel experience.  Some simply hated the cattle-herd experience at regional airports.  

ARD (public TV, Channel One) brought up this topic in the AM today.  It's an interesting piece of news.

The German Bahn folks are having meetings with Switzerland, Austria and France.  The aim is to recreate the night-train 'empire'.

The word 'renaissance' is being used (train riders go nuts over the phrase).

The term 'night-jet' is being thrown around.  Two new routes?  Zurich to Amsterdam, and Vienna to Paris.  They would be operational by December of 2021.

Zurich to Barcelona and Berlin to Paris would be up and operational by the end of 2023.

By the end....13 routes would be pieced together.  

To be heavily used or profitable?  Well....no one is really saying that.  Prices will escalate (compared to what you paid 20 years ago).  Looking at this Berlin to Paris route....just how many people would pay for nine-hour ride that you could complete in 75 minutes aboard a plane, for half the half the cost?

I could ask the question in Amsterdam....just how many people nightly....are hot to ride the nine-hour ride (assuming it stops at least 3 times: Koln, Frankfurt, and Wurzburg)?  Who really wants to arrive in Frankfurt at 5 AM or in Koln at 3:30 AM?

Part of this discussion....there's chatter about global warming and the need to massively clamp down on flights.  Some folks are expecting taxes to be inserted to make a simple Berlin to Amsterdam flight upwards to 300 Euro (currently around 150 Euro round-trip).  In that case, the untaxed railway adventure would save you from the tax business....but add seven hours of travel onto the experience.

So we'd be making a success out of railway travel....only because of CO2 discussions and 'fake' taxes?  Yeah....more or less.

For the night-train enthusiasts....it's all Disneyland-stuff and absolutely the best news.  A light bag, a beer in the lounge-car, and a little adventure in the sleeping car....to arrive in Amsterdam and all fired-up.