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On the one hand, who doesn’t love taking a shower on a train? On the other hand, if the bathtub is too small and you can’t get up again after dumping the soap, maybe this isn’t a great idea.
This year we’re seeing a resurgence of sleepy rail around Europe, including new lines from Brussels to Prague and Graz, Austria, to Warsaw. This month a particularly significant overnight train – from Hamburg to Stockholm – will start running. According to rail travel expert Mark Smith, it will be a “game changer”.
But I couldn’t wait until September for a summer date in Stockholm. So I repeated the journey as much as I could to see how the night train journey felt now that it was back. I took the Interrail pass from London to Hamburg and headed to Malmö, where I boarded a rather old sleeper train running north along the route used by the new Euronight service.
The service, run by Sweden’s national rail operator SJ, “gets you from London to Stockholm in 24 hours,” says Smith, who co-founded the in-demand website Seat61.com. It will be the “missing link” for travelers from the UK to Sweden, perhaps persuading many to take the train instead of flying. It starts from St. Pancras to Brussels with the Eurostar and then transfers to the high-speed line to Hamburg, after which the speed decreases but the comfort increases.
The Euronight covers the 670 miles from Hamburg to Stockholm in 13 hours starting at 9am and stopping in Copenhagen and arriving in Stockholm at 10am.
SJ’s existing sleeper service from Malmö ran out quickly – I got four hours of sleep in a six-hour journey. Anyway, the wobbly bunk bed was tidy and the gentle rat-a-tat rocking was comforting.
In reality, such a journey is too short for a sleeper service, but a sleeper from Malmö to Stockholm is the best facility for the new service. Despite Denmark’s best efforts to derail me (trains were stopped for three hours across Zealand due to an electrical fire at a critical junction), I crossed the Øresund rail and road bridge from Copenhagen to join the night train. Vintage, Swedish-made sleeping carriages.
The new service uses the moth-driven carriages of Austrian Railways several years ago. In a demand-led resurgence of sleeper services across Europe, SJs have brought them out of retirement and are being retrofitted. “The new sleeper coaches aren’t new,” said Jeanette Andreasen, a train attendant who oversaw my trip. [but they are] They are not as old as these. However, she was concerned that they were a little narrower than the existing ones.
The improvements may only be skin-deep, but the Malmö to Stockholm carriages will certainly be better. But narrowness does not produce good results. I’m small, but I find myself showering in Swedish-made carriages, bending over to retrieve discarded soap and struggling to get up again. “You have to wash yourself with soap over and over and then you slip so it doesn’t stick,” laughed Andreasen.
A bathroom is a luxury on any train, even if it is small, but it is only offered as a first class option on the new service. Budget travelers can choose their seat, and the next level is a seat in a six-seater sofa (for the first few weeks, the entire service will be sofa-only).
It is not yet clear whether they will be woken up by the border guards at night – the staff I spoke to in the train thought that they could protect passports during the journey, but the train company suggested that other arrangements might be necessary – and the journey. It ends with a boxed breakfast.
Meanwhile, mine ended up in a hotel opposite Stockholm Central Station, where sleepy passengers indulge in a buffet breakfast of cold meats and croissants. There I met via Zoom with Maja Rosen, the founder of We Stay on the Ground, an organization that coordinates the “Flight Free” movement, which now has chapters around the world.
Rosen lives three hours north of Stockholm and hasn’t flown since 2008. If she has to travel at all, she says, it has to be by train, boat, foot or bike. She believes that flying must be limited, or there won’t be much of the world left to see.
“Now we have to reduce emissions, but it’s also about making a statement. Promising to go on a free flight is a very effective way to make people around you realize that we need to change our lifestyle. We can’t continue with business as usual,” says Rosen. “There are so many ways to explore the world without flying.”
One of the most significant obstacles was the financial cost, but my trip wasn’t expensive for the planet. According to ecopassenger.org, traveling by train to Stockholm emits 49 kilograms of carbon dioxide, while an airplane emits up to 380 kilograms per person. Not only is fuel used efficiently, the Euronight Train runs on renewables.
Until recently, the Swedes were the most common flyers on the planet. This love of flying is fading fast as the climate crisis is particularly pronounced in Sweden.
Traveling by train definitely feels more virtuous than flying. There’s even a Swedish neologism for this feeling: tagskryt – “Training brags” – or how some people, including me, shout about their long distance train journeys while others fly.
Some may see this as a sign of virtue. Allow them. I will be the one lying on my back under an Egyptian cotton sheet in a gently rocking sleeper carriage in Schleswig-Holstein and rolling through the night.
The Euronight service from Hamburg to Stockholm starts at 1 September.
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