I love night trains. It's really convenient to be able to go to sleep in one place and wake up at my destination in the morning. Train stations tend to be in much more central locations compared to airports, and it's nice to not have to go through security.
Night train is very popular around the world, and it's a hit with tourists because they can save extra day on hotel expense and travelling time. It's a kind of travelling hack.
Japan Sunrise Night Train is extremely popular and tourist need to book them several weeks in advance to get a ticket [1]. You can use Japan Rail Pass card for the nobi-nobi economy seats but need to pay extra for the private compartments.
I think it depends how you look at it, but night trains in Japan are actually not that popular -- so much so they had to reduce routes so the Sunrise Seto became the only surviving night train (as pointed out in your linked article), which why it's hard to book.
I actually wanted to book it from Osaka to Tokyo, but there were a number of hoops to jump through to book it from abroad with a JR Rail Pass that hadn't yet been exchanged, that I ended up just book another hotel night and then hopped on an morning Shinkansen to Tokyo.
Barely anyone takes the Sunrise Seto. I managed to easily book it while I was there. I really want to take it again when I am back, 100% quintessential Japanese bliss. I hope they never get rid of it.
As an American sleeper train enthusiast, my recs are:
- If you find yourself in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland, the Nightjet is IMHO the best sleeper train in the world on balance. Between very reasonable fares, high hotel rates in the cities it serves, and mostly new rolling stock, it's a bargain.
- If you live on the East Coast or Midwestern US, there are several Amtrak services that are reasonably priced when booked well in advance (3-6 months). The City of New Orleans (from Chicago) or the silver services (two different NYC - Florida trains, but they take different routes through NC, SC, and GA) have much more reasonable fares than the Western routes.
- You can often get a good deal on Via Rail in Canada; they still allow you to book a single berth, and they regularly release promo fares for specific dates. The deals are available at https://www.viarail.ca/en/offers/sleeper-plus-class-deals/ and you can scroll down to see the dates and routes that there are savings on. The best deals are from the major cities in Canada (especially Montreal) to points East on the Ocean - you can get a discount private cabin from e.g. Montreal to Halifax, but you're SOL if you want to go to Vancouver in anything other than a berth. Book a Corridor to get to Montreal. These are best booked close-in, unlike Amtrak.
However, if you have the means, book a room(ette) on the Empire Builder in winter. It's simply incredible.
I used to take the night train between Shanghai and Beijing. It was ok, but train stations in China are not generally as central as they are in Europe/Japan (although usually better positioned than the states). The HSR stations are even less convenient in their locations (eg Beijing South vs Beijing main station), however, so now it’s a bit less convenient. The new HSR trains have replaced the night trains (no need for a bed on a four hour ride).
I met my wife and the mother of my children on the Amtrak “coast starlight express” - the late train that runs between LA and SF. We were seated together for dinner in the dining car and the rest is history. We would be first in line for this! Fantastic idea - I hope the economics make sense!
Cabin (https://www.cabinprivatetravel.com/) used to offer an SF-LA sleeper bus circa 2017, but looks like they're just doing private charters nowadays. I guess they couldn't make it work even with $115 one-way tickets. The sleeper train here is admittedly aiming at a slightly different audience but it's not clear to me it'll be any more successful...
They take 10 hours?? (10pm to 8am) It's not even 600km.
Here in Spain I can travel the 800km from Barcelona to Madrid in 2.5 actual hours. Now this is a high speed train but even one that isn't shouldn't take that long.
A high speed train this distance would be less than 2 hours making a day return a total possibility (I've done the same to Madrid) and eliminating the need for a hotel/sleep accomodation altogether for a meeting.
In fact this kind of distance is really in the realm of "high-speed rail faster than air travel" due to the extra waits at airports and usually further from the city locations, not sure how bad this is in the US though. In Europe it's pretty bad.
Not trying to bash here but it sounds like they're deliberately slow just so they can sell a moving hotel room.
For overnight sleeper trains, it's a feature to be longer than 8 hours, not a bug. The point is to get a full night's sleep, not half a night's sleep.
This is 1 hour to settle in, 8 hours of sleep, and 1 hour to change, refresh, have coffee and breakfast.
And it goes without saying this is not a high-speed train. It's using existing rail infrastructure so it's pointless to compare with what you can do in Spain, I don't know why you're even bringing that up. It certainly does sound like you're trying to bash here.
The way most countries do it, the sleeper runs at whatever speed, and then just gets shunted to an out of the way platform, and the passengers have to disembark by a certain time. But - and this is the key difference - anyone wanting an earlier start can depart as soon as they wish once the train has arrived at the destination.
Trains also don't get to take a very straight route... it goes west quite aways from central LA until it hits the coast, and then follows the coast north. It's certainly not HSR.
I find that mode of operation extremely disruptive. Part of the point of sleeping on train is sleeping on a moving train, and to sense at 03:00 or whatever that the train has stopped, permanently, destroys my ability to sleep.
UK. They have a lot less sleepers than they did 30 or 40 years ago though, when most of the main lines were limited to 70-85mph, and not the 125 the majors ones are today.
What they'd also do, on multi-stop routes, is arrange the passengers by destination, back to front, so when they hit the first stop they'd just uncouple the back car or two, then continue on.
Yeah, I mispoke with Dundee. The Caledonian runs to Fort William as its furthest extent, but also splits somewhere in Borders to get some carriages to Edinburgh.
I wonder if it could be possible to enable Amtrak - or passengers - to sue to enforce the law that says it has priority over freight?
"By Federal law, with only very few exceptions Amtrak passenger trains must be given preference over freight trains in using any rail line. Unfortunately, only the Department of Justice can enforce this law, and it has brought only one enforcement action against a freight company in Amtrak’s history, and that was nearly 40 years ago! As a result, freight railroads suffer no significant consequences for prioritizing their freight over our country’s rail passengers."[1] (emphasis mine)
Non-road transit infrastructure in the US is quite bad and notoriously expensive to build. I very much enjoyed using the train system in Spain when I visited. Wish we had something like that here.
If you're going for a day of work would you rather waste 2-3 hours each way and sleep at home or sleep in the train?
Sleeper train is a no-brainer for me.
I didn't know that, it's crazy long considering it's actually closer than Barcelona from Madrid. I've never been to Portugal.
I know we really suck at international high-speed rail in Europe (or even international rail for that matter, even trains from Holland to Germany still need to swap drivers). But this kind of performance is weird on the Iberian peninsula.
I would not be surprised if they actually make it slower on purpose to make the experience more pleasant.
Imagine if a hotel would only allow you to sleep between 10 PM and 6 AM. That would suck for people who go to bed at 1 AM, right? That’s what you would get on a 8-hour sleeper train.
Since the train is 11 hours long, it can accommodate a comfortable night’s sleep for a wide variety of people. Some people can have a late dinner and drinks at the dining car, while others can turn in early and have breakfast in the morning.
The problem everyone had with the overnight LA-SF bus was that the drive wasn't long enough for a proper night's sleep, if you could sleep at all bounced around in your bunk. Granted a train allows for better accommodation, but doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Given that a train is in fixed rails, a far more strict route than a bus on tires on the freeway, dodging cars and lane-splitting motorcyclists (which is legal in California), it seems like there'd be far less bouncing around on a train.
I know they exist, the one's I've seen are used to store towels and other things. By functional I mean really the kind you can shower in, with no pain.
Has anyone actually tried them? how is the water pressure?
Pain? Like from them being too small or causing you to fall over or something?
I’ve used them, they’re fine. IIRC quite large. I don’t remember them being amazing, so the water pressure was probably just at the ‘acceptable’ level.
They have the usual drawbacks of shared showers - water and dirt creeping into the dry areas because people aren’t careful - so if I were designing a new luxury sleeping train car I’d try to get one per cabin, or maybe one per pair of cabins.
> Vollebregt said Dreamstar’s service would be “more like a private jet company than a big airline,” focused on the specialized niche of “upscale, overnight, hotel train service.”
> One-way tickets would cost about $300, $600 and $1,000, depending on the tier of room, which Vollebregt said is higher than typical airfare, but below other North American sleeper trains.
I'm going to say this niche fits exactly 5 people in the state of California.
Most people who travel a lot like that are probably pre-check, maybe even clear. I am, and usually I get to the airport roughly when boarding starts if I'm flying economy (assuming boarding starts with first class). It's certainly not 6 hours total in the airport.
This said, I'd really like better trains since flying sucks still. Planes are dirty, expensive, and airports are quite awful.
I have Precheck and typically clear security in under 10 minutes. That said, 45 mins is cutting it close for me. Typically I arrive an hour before so that I have a buffer against uncertainty (Precheck lines can be surprising long sometimes).
Sleeping in a hotel room is still preferable to an uncomfortable bed on a bumpy train. And most business travelers on this route fly in directly in the morning and fly out in the evening, no hotel needed.
If they are serious about train commutes between SF and LA they need to make the high speed rail line happen and ferry people across in 2.5 hours station to station. Anything else is a non-starter.
No business traveller is getting the $50 ticket though. And I like being rocked to sleep on a train... Not sure about US but on trains I've been on the middle fare is already quite comfy. The lower fares tend to lack in vertical space tbough. And your point about morning-in, evening-out is valid too.
For some! I've done a cross-country train trip and I really liked it, despite Amtrak's cars clearly needing a refresh. I'd prefer this.
A while back, a bunch of friends were all going from SF to the same conference in LA. Some drew, some flew. Door to door, it took about the same amount of time thanks to getting to the airport, renting a car, and getting from the airport. 6-7 hours, basically. Then there's checking in, etc.
So from my perspective, I can burn a day on travel and a night at a hotel. Or I can sleep through the travel and recover a whole day for something I actually want to use it for.
If you're convenient to the airport on both sides and want to spend on both the flight and the room, knock yourself out. No 800 sq ft suites with balconies on a train. But if your aim is the city center on either end, and you'd like to not waste time or money, a night train with comfortable bunks is perfect. You waste few waking hours traveling in/out of airports, stripping for TSA, etc.
“more like a private jet” is a bit of a joke. The primary benefit of a private jet is that it isn’t on a schedule and goes where you want when you want. Aside from them both being transportation, a train is about as far from a private jet as you can get.
As a tourist, a $300 sleeper train would be the obvious choice between LA and SF. Any halfway decent train service is superior to flying in economy. $300 would not be a bad price, considering that you avoid paying for a night in hotel.
Insert snark about socal traffic. But honestly rail travel in the US is obnoxiously slow and freight has priority resulting in maddening delays. As long as they don't wake up the passengers on arrival, and stay parked until a reasonable hour, this may be the only way to travel by rail and get there on time.
US train companies are allergic to capital investment. Essentially no electrification, limited double tracking, passing sidings too short for the 2 mile+ freight trains, and essentially no alignment upgrades to increase running speed. Then we put a precision scheduled railway (PSR) operational model on top of it which incorporates none of these words => basically freight trains move ad-hoc when they are ready. This is why Amtrak service in the west can be 18 hours+ behind schedule.
In Russia, the entire Trans-Siberian Railroad is electrified and almost entirely double tracked.
In short, the car industry and car culture won out here. A lot of public transit is seen as for the poor and other disfavored groups. The US right complains endlessly about Amtrak subsidies, while somehow ignoring the half-trillion dollars (per Wikipedia) spent on the interstate system (plus lots more spending at the state for highways, etc).
The US makes very good use of its extensive rail system but they use it for astonishing amounts of cargo, not for moving around small numbers of people very quickly. Outside of perhaps the Boston/DC corridor, passenger rail service is about enjoying the scenery. For any other use, cars, buses, and airplanes are better in most ways.
Although I hate to admit it because I love the idea of CA HSR, it seems like allocating that eleventy billion dollars or whatever it’s supposed to cost, towards making sleeper car service on this route cheap and readily available (in other words making sure they can do long enough trains, and subsidizing prices to bring down ticket costs) would have had a bigger impact than the ambitious but decades-long effort that we are doing (unless Dems lose the political power anytime in the 2020s, at which point they might just abandon it all to rot half-finished and useless).
I know I’d be just fine with making that trip this way especially if those tax dollars brought down the cost.
In Europe sleeper trains have become somewhat extinct. High speed rail is just so fast and Ryanair so cheap, they became unprofitable.
However, there seems to be a revival going on. Especially the Australian railway operator (OBB) is investing a lot in their Nightjet trains. Some of the trains allow you to take your car with you.
I'm not sure if they are profitable, but they seem to be fully booked during the summer months (we had to book 2+ months in advance last year)
Article mentions Japanese trains. Once a slightly fast train exists that can do the distance in less than four hours, it will kill the airlines and change the market entirely. (Experience of JR East in expanding services to new markets, 4-5 hours is the max distance Shinkansen out-competes air). Shinkansen have killed sleeper trains in Japan, whenever its built it will kill a service like this.
In Japan a central station is within a hub of business and retail activity. In LA the central station is next to county jail and Skid Row. There’s additional expense (probably on both ends for SF-LA trip) that’s negligible in Japan to get to the final destination within the city.
Having the central station next to the jail and skid row is a political choice in CA, just like their choice to not build HSR between LA-SF. If they had enough political will to build a modern train along the length of California, they'd have enough political will to build a new train station somewhere decent.
It's not even an American problem: NYC has a nice, brand-new train station right in the middle of Manhattan. The old one used to be under Madison Square Gardens and was decent and serviceable, but they recently completed a new one across the street under the old post office building, so taking a train from DC to NYC is actually a pretty decent experience. If NYC can build a really nice new Amtrak station in a desirable location, what's California's excuse?
