For Andrés, who lives in the south of Galicia, the night train would be very useful. He has to travel a lot for work and that forces him to go through Madrid. If he could travel at night, he explains, he would win: he would not have to get up so early to make stops, because he could travel while he sleeps and catch the first plane from the capital to his final destination. But, as much as his accounts favor the night train, he cannot take it: the last night trains leaving Galicia stopped running at the start of the pandemic.
With them, these services completely disappeared from Spanish roads. From Renfe they confirm that the last night trains were those that linked Madrid and Galicia and this community with Barcelona. They also warn from the railway company: “There is no forecast in relation to night buses.”
However, Andrés is not the only one who is interested in this transport alternative to flights. Towards the end of the last decade, the search for more environmentally friendly ways to travel was progressively increasing. In fact, that was when the term ‘flygskam’, a Swedish word meaning the ‘shame of flying’, went viral.
The idea was not exactly new – it had already started in the previous decade – but the statistics of travelers in 2019 from some countries made the trend more evident: there were already numbers that showed that there were people who were changing their habits.
Bloomberg published in November of that year that the German airlines had lost 12% of their travelers, in what he called the “Greta effect”, by the environmental activist Greta Thunberg. And if the Germans did not travel by plane, it was because they did so more and more, the investigation recalled, by train.
In that winter of 2019 to 2020, this means of transport was positioned as a potential winning element. Interest was growing and, above all, they did not stop talking about the return of formats that had been out of fashion for some time. It was time to bring back the night train, which had been part of the European landscape before it began its decline.
Reasons for its decline
In 2017, a
study Made for a committee of the European Parliament, he delved into the state of night trains. Reading your conclusions section summarizes when and why your eclipse began. Between 1980 and 2017, the railway services of the different countries were shelving their night lines or reducing them.
Costs per passenger kilometer were too high, special skills were needed to run such trains, and tickets were more expensive than daytime runs, the report noted.
In addition, competition from airplanes had left those lines in a precarious situation, and the rolling stock of the railway companies was getting old. In fact, anyone who had traveled on the night trains that left Madrid for Galicia in the first decades of the century could have pointed out that last conclusion to the experts without much effort: the feeling when you got on one of those trains was not very positive. . The cheapest fare—a seat in economy class—didn’t even allow the seat to recline.
The infrastructure has not accompanied in recent times: the cheapest tickets corresponded to seats that did not even recline in the Talgo.
Night runs had their enthusiastic fans, but were not enough to guarantee continuity of service. From Renfe they point out that they were not profitable. And this data is important, because the operator points out that they are “commercial and not public service”, so management must be connected to their commercial profitability.
“The hotel train product is the one that presents the worst demand, occupancy and use ratios, as well as negative profit margins in recent years,” they recall from their communication office, adding that there are alternative services that cover the needs of Travellers.
But, despite all this, just before the pandemic night trains experienced that ‘hype’: they had become fashionable and forecasts announcing their return followed one another on the internet and indicated that the ‘millennials’ were more than willing to travel at night to help save the planet.
“I haven’t done it for a lot of years, but because there isn’t one,” confesses Andrés. If Renfe recovered those night trains, it would be something else. “In addition to being more ecological and reducing the 4 tons of carbon that I burned last year in planes – which I have calculated – it would be much more comfortable for me,” he says, noting that he has already begun to follow companies that they promise to recover the night trains.
Like this traveler, others would also consider changing their habits. According to a recent study of
Back-on-Tracka European network of initiatives linked to the night train, 7 out of 10 Europeans would consider changing the plane for these services.
“The night train is a clean means of transport,” says Adrien Aumont, the co-founder of Midnight Trains, on the other end of the phone, one of those companies that intends to unite Europe with night journeys. It’s not working out yet—they’ll do it in 2025, he promises, a date that’s “not that far away”—but his plans are moving forward. So it’s no surprise that Aumont doesn’t think the promise of the return of this mode of transportation is far-fetched. “If we make a good product, it will come back,” he says.
This greater sustainable awareness partly explains it, but it also makes it somewhat more pragmatic. Travelers have ended up realizing that the routine of flying has become “crap”, because of the ‘low-cost’ experience or having to go to airports well in advance.
Therefore, if the night train strives to offer comfort and uses trains designed in that direction, it will have an advantage factor. Aumont insists that they must “make a 21st century product.” It is also what indicates a
recent dutch study: the key to returning to the night train is comfort.
The co-founder of Midnight Trains also assures that the night train can be profitable: it will not be if you plan to cover the entire territory —although he remembers that this is a service of public companies “that are not there to make money”— but yes if It is concentrated in corridors with large masses of travelers. The first line in which he works his company is, in fact, the Paris-Milan-Venice.
Midnight Trains is one of the names that is always mentioned when talking about the ‘revival’ of night trains, but it is far from the only company in Europe that is trying to capture this emerging market.
The Austrian public railway company ÖBB is behind Nightjet, which already offers a range of routes through central Europe, and this spring the European Sleeper trains will also start running, linking Brussels with Berlin via the Netherlands.
Perhaps most importantly, not only do consumers seem more interested in this way of traveling, but also the authorities are promoting it. Some countries, such as Belgium, offer financial incentives to rail operators with night journeys.
The European Commission has just announced its support for 10 cross-border routes — “by day as by night” — which should start, in some cases, before this summer. Therefore, the promised ‘revival’ of the night train could become a fact.
Cleaner
The Back-on-Track accounts – presented a few months ago and based on statistics from 2019, the last normal year before the pandemic – indicate that the train is responsible for 0.12% of greenhouse gas emissions of the EU. Aviation is 11.68%. Emissions from airplanes are between 28 and 16 times higher than those from night trains. If 32% of travelers switched to the night train for distances of up to 1,500 or 3,000 km, air traffic emissions would fall by 26%. To change things, his study points out, it would be necessary to finish the projects that reinforce the infrastructure or expand the rolling stock.
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