With the revival of night train service across Europe, led by Austria’s state railways, comes a dream for a service that never existed: Sleeper trains from London to points across the Continent.
The idea has been raised by European Sleeper, a new company that is soon to launch its first route, a service linking Brussels, Amsterdam and Berlin to Prague. Elmer van Buuren, one of European Sleeper’s founders, told the Observer (UK) that “London and the UK is just that much further away from the rest of the continent that it would actually be very sensible to have a sleeper service. Despite Brexit, I think there’s still many people in the UK that want to come to Europe for holidays and business so I think there’s definitely a market there.”
Of course, he’s not the first to think so. In the distant past, before the Channel Tunnel, there were links by Channel ferry to European sleeper routes. In the more recent past there was a project to operate ‘Nightstar’ service that would have linked London, Plymouth, Swansea and Glasgow to Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Cologne. The project, in the 1990s, was killed off by the rise of budget airlines, but not before trains for it were ordered and built. They were eventually sold to a Canadian operator and run between Montreal and Halifax.
