Why Britain should re-embrace the sleeper train

National railway networks have two choices. Make trains fast, regular and efficient so that passengers can travel during the day, and maintenance work can take place after dark. Or, run night trains so people can – at least – save time and perhaps money by sleeping as they travel.

Britain has the worst of both worlds. Its trains are certainly slow and can be very expensive. There are regional inter-city trains that average 30 miles an hour, as on the notorious Penistone Line between Sheffield and Huddersfield. The record-breaking Blackburn-Kirkby service takes two hours to move people around 20 miles across the north west, the most densely populated area of the UK outside London. Inter-city trips to the capital are somewhat faster, and the Home Counties are well served by modern express trains.

Sleepers go slower than daytime trains. The Glasgow Central to London Euston service – as featured on the new BBC One comedy-thriller Nightsleeper – takes seven hours and 35 minutes, a lot of time to cover a mere 400 miles, and slow enough to stretch out into three weeks of telly. Britain isn’t huge and in some ways the tortoise speed arguably suits the business of boarding, dining, falling asleep and waking around dawn.

But we just don’t have enough sleepers, do we? You will have read in these pages of the Europe-wide revival of night trains – how start-up firms such as European Sleeper and Midnight Trains, as well as the Swedish and French governments, are reopening sleeper routes across the continent. Austria came top of our comprehensive survey of rail travel in European countries partly because ÖBB, which operates its railways, took a punt in 2016 and bought up all the City Night Line sleeper cars that Deutsche Bahn had dumped. It’s now the largest night-train operator in central Europe, connecting Vienna and other Austrian cities to more than 25 European destinations.

Britain currently has sleeper trains from London Euston to Glasgow and Edinburgh, which continue as far north as Inverness, Fort William and Aberdeen – collectively known as the Caledonian Sleeper – as well as Night Riviera trains from London Paddington to Penzance via Taunton and Plymouth. The timetables and, to an extent, distances, mean the services cater principally to Londoners and London-bound weekly commuters. I recently used the Caledonian Sleeper to go from Preston to Wick in Scotland; I departed after midnight and on the return leg was ejected at 4am. Some stops on both lines are drop-off only.

Nevertheless, the two surviving routes have featured in novels, poetry and song, documentaries and now a rather unfrightening thriller. Despite the often-exorbitant fares, baffling price structures, delays, cancellations, strikes and cancelled megaprojects, Britons somehow still keep faith in their railways, and they reserve special affection for the idea, if not always the reality, of the sleeper service.

Perhaps that’s down to the collective memory of how things used to be. Older readers may recall the delights of these lost services: separate night trains from Euston to Liverpool and Manchester; King’s Cross to Bradford Exchange; Manchester to Plymouth via Bristol; night ferry services via Stranraer, Heysham, Milford Haven and Holyhead; London to Newcastle on the East Coast mainline; Inverness-Carlisle-Stranraer; Poole to Edinburgh; sleeping cars through to Mallaig; St Pancras to Settle.

This is the stuff railway-lover dreams are made of. But all the above existed, as can be confirmed by a shunt around rail fan forums or by scanning vintage timetables. During the Second World War, night trains continued to run, often covering long non-stop sections unimaginable today, even by daylight. Right up until 1980, the Paris Night Ferry, a sleeper boat train, departed London Victoria every evening at 9pm, arriving at Gare du Nord 11 hours later.

Specific sleeper services have come and gone, but the basic idea of night trains played an important role in British transport and leisure until the Thatcher era.

“Sleeper services were rationalised by British Rail in 1988, with services to Scotland concentrated on Euston to make [them] more financially viable against the car and internal flights,” says Dr Thomas Spain, a research associate at the National Railway Museum.

“Some of the withdrawn sleepers once formed connections with shipping routes, such as Euston-Stranraer or Holyhead-Euston. There was also a cross-country sleeper service linking Bristol with Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as Scottish internal services connecting key cities.”

Cross-country night trains had ceased by 1994. In tandem with the recently launched Eurostar services, a UK-to-Europe night service called “Nightstar” was proposed (promotional material dangled promises like “Go to bed in Plymouth or Swansea and wake up in Paris”), but never got off the ground because of the focus on rail privatisation and a perceived lack of commercial viability due to competition from cheap air travel.

According to a report by sustainability consultancy the Rebel Group, per carriage costs for UK sleepers are among the highest in Europe. The recent Tory government was more interested in electric road transport than railways, and the word “sleeper” doesn’t appear on Labour’s pre-election transport policy document, “Getting Britain Moving”. But Greenpeace has identified a range of workable London-Europe rail connections that can compete with air travel and the UK has long-distance daytime routes (Scotland to Devon, West Wales to East Anglia, anywhere to Penzance) that would be more pleasurable in a sleeper – and markets can change. As recently as 2017, the European Parliament produced a report called “Passenger Night Trains in Europe – the end of the line?”

Dr Spain says: “Potentially, more sleeper trains can be run, if political and public demand is there. The Caledonian Sleeper shows how a network of locations can be served by two trains.

“Sleeper services tend to be more viable over longer distances, which is why the Night Riviera and Caledonian Sleeper remain. They can be woven between overnight planned engineering works and freight services.”

The night trains of the past had names like the Tynesider, the Northern Irishman, Night Aberdonian, Royal Highlander and Freedom of Scotland. Television’s fictional “Nightsleeper” doesn’t work as a show title nor as a train name. The tech-filled nonsense of the over-wrought plot sent me back to Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (1932), a novel of shadows and subtleties, exotic locations and mysterious characters. Somehow the journey from that strange book to the daft television series mirrors the decline of the sleepers – which used to connect us, provide us with travel fantasies as well as literal places to dream, and make travel romantic and memorable.

What have we today? Few options to sleep on trains without crossing the Channel, and nothing unless we happen to live in the capital, Scotland or Cornwall. For the rest of us it’s the crack-of-dawn, wallet-busting inter-cities, an assurance of delays, a stiff-backed chair and, where once there were kippers and silver service in the Pullman buffet car, we get “apologies but the coffee machine is broken today”.