Text A: Sleeping our way across the continent

[1] For most of the last forty years, the night train looked like a museum piece — a relic of a slower, more romantic age that the modern world had left firmly behind. As cheap flights spread across the world, the slow sleeper services were quietly shut down, their elegant old carriages sold for scrap or left to rust in forgotten sidings. Yet the trains are coming back, and faster than anyone predicted. More than 25 new overnight routes have opened across Europe in the past five years alone, linking cities that had not been joined by a sleeper in a generation, and tickets for many of them sell out within hours of going on sale.

[2] The collapse, when it came, was swift and almost total. A budget airline could carry a passenger between two distant cities in ninety minutes for the price of a sandwich, and no train, however comfortable, could hope to compete with that. One by one, governments stopped paying the subsidies that kept the sleepers running, judging them an expensive indulgence. The night services slipped off the timetables, the booking offices closed, and the whole idea of crossing a continent in your sleep came to seem charmingly old-fashioned, seemingly gone for good.

[3] What has changed, above all, is the way people think about that quick, cheap flight. A growing number of travellers now count the cost of their journeys in carbon as well as in cash, and a night train produces only a tiny fraction of the pollution of a short-haul flight. For some, refusing to fly has become a matter of principle. But there is comfort, too, in the old magic of the sleeper: of falling asleep in one country and waking, curtains drawn back, in another, with a small breakfast on a tray and a slow-moving window of mountains and fields where an airport queue used to be.

[4] The revival is not simple, however, and its champions are honest about the obstacles. The surviving carriages are ageing and ruinously expensive to repair, and building comfortable new ones takes years. Borders that an aeroplane crosses in an instant still tangle the trains in a knot of different rules, signals and electrical systems, so that a locomotive which works perfectly in one country may be useless across the frontier. And a single delayed sleeper, halted at a border in the small hours, can block a line for hundreds of passengers behind it.

Text B: One ticket, one continent

[5] Campaigners argue that the night train will only truly succeed if the countries it crosses stop behaving like rivals. Their proposal is a single, shared booking system: one website, one ticket, for every sleeper service on the continent, however many borders it crosses and whichever company runs each section of the line.

[6] Such a system would cost little to build, since it would simply connect the timetables that already exist rather than replacing them. Passengers, instead of puzzling over a dozen national websites in a dozen languages, could plan a journey across half a continent in a single search, and would be far more likely to choose the train at all.

[7] The campaigners add that a shared platform would let the railways pool their data, so that a sleeper running late in one country could warn the connecting service in the next before a passenger is ever stranded. Smaller routes, too easily overlooked today, would appear beside the famous ones, and the savings from a single system could be spent on the new carriages the network so badly needs.