The romance of the night train

Austria’s Nightjet leaves Vienna in time to catch twilight in the Alps

(Image credit: Alamy)

I fell in love with night trains while travelling around India in 2010, said Monisha Rajesh in The Guardian. Rail journeys by day were often great, but darkness brought a special kind of magic. I would “find peace in the cool of the open doorway”, chatting to hawkers and ticket inspectors, and seeing the world beyond while other passengers slept. Back in Europe, I was sad to discover that sleeper services were being culled there, owing to the rise of budget airlines and high-speed rail lines. But recently, that trend has been reversed, owing partly to concerns over climate change, as well as the change in perspective brought by the pandemic.

Campaign groups such as Back on Track have helped drive the resurgence, and companies such as the crowdfunded European Sleeper have created new services. The main pioneer, however, has been Austrian Federal Railways, which launched its Nightjet network on 14 routes in 2016, using old rolling stock bought from Deutsche Bahn – and then, “to the delight of train nerds like me”, expanded to 20 routes with a brand new fleet in 2023. Its couchette compartments have “minicabins” for solo travellers that a friend compared to sleeping in a bread bin (though I didn’t find them too claustrophobic, just not all that comfortable). But for a recent journey with my two young daughters from Vienna to Rome, I booked a four-person private compartment, with safety barriers on the upper berths and a large window.

We left Vienna before 7pm, and it was still light as we “swept” around the Alps, past horses grazing in paddocks and scattered hamlets. In the “blue-grey twilight”, we watched streams “gleam like strips of metal”, and spotted a single stag “poised at the edge of a wood”. At 7am, we woke up “to rumpled clouds and a golden flare on the horizon”, and had plenty of time to enjoy a “leisurely” breakfast onboard before our 10am arrival in Rome – unusually late for a night train.