A train ride from Paris to Rome can take 13 hours, while a direct flight is just a little over two hours. But if you could make the journey overnight in a private sleeper car with a private bathroom—and easy access to a cozy bar if you don’t feel like sleeping—you might choose the experience over flying.
At least that’s the bet made by Midnight Trains, a French startup that is one of a growing number of night train services in Europe. The company argues that since trains have a much smaller carbon footprint than planes, it’s important to improve them so that a train ride can better compete with air travel. “We want to have a real impact and to convince others to stop flying,” says Romain Payet, cofounder of Midnight Trains. “In order to do so we have to reinvent night train experience and services.”
Then came Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who refuses to fly and who inspired the concepts of flygskam (“flight shame”) and tågskryt (“train brag”). More people started to switch to trains from airplanes; in Sweden, train trips grew 11% in 2019, the same year that Thunberg crossed the Atlantic on a sailboat instead of a jet. Last year, the French government voted to ban domestic flights that take less than two and half hours when it’s possible to make the same trip by train. In Austria, pandemic bailout money for Austrian Airlines included the requirement to eliminate short flights that could be replaced by train trips. Sweden is investing in night trains throughout Europe as part of a broader plan to shrink transportation emissions. The European Commission is also calling for a big shift to rail transportation. Right now, 17 of the 20 most popular flight routes in Europe are between cities that are less than 500 miles apart, and could be replaced by train trips.
“We do not want to create a luxury service, we just believe that if we want to convince travelers to stop flying we have to set up a new benchmark of night trains,” Payet says. That includes fully private cabins, a good bar and restaurant, a sleek app, and modern design. The cheapest offerings will be individual capsules with no private bathroom, ranging up to suites with a double bed and bathroom.
