After many years of decline, night trains are returning to parts of Europe. Here is how the largest night train operator Nightjet figured out how to run them profitably.
After Deutsche Bahn announced it was discontinuing its City Night Line sleeper trains in 2015 due for economic reasons, ÖBB (Austrian Federal Railways) took over many of its coaches and some of its routes, rebranding those trains and its own EuroNight branded trains as Nightjet, complementing its day service Railjet. Before the German expansion, ÖBB carried 1 million sleeper passengers but boosted it to 1.4 million in 2017 and 1.6 million in 2018. That same year, ÖBB ordered 13 new seven-car trainsets and expanded that order 20 more seven-car trainsets in 2021. ÖBB keeps its passenger numbers per route to itself although one of the busiest, Zurich-Berlin & Hamburg, reportedly has 200,000 passengers annually. While sleepers made less than 5% of ÖBB long-distance passengers in 2017, they provided 15-20% of the revenue due to the higher ticket prices.
Why sleep on a train
Sleeper trains use far less energy than flying or even less than high-speed trains, making them the most environmentally friendly long-distance option. Flygskam or flight shame has taken off in Europe as people learn about the high environmental cost of flying short distances. Night trains do not require expensive high-speed tracks and serve downtown stations instead of distant airports. Rather than waste half a day flying or a full day driving, a sleeper passenger falls asleep in one city and wakes up in another one, especially as the trains leave after dinner and usually arrive between 6 am and 10 am. While tickets for a room are not cheap, they are compared to the cost of a hotel. While most potential riders would balk at a 13-hour train ride in the day, the same travel time overnight feels like a 3-4 hour day train.
Staffing
Nightjet is operated by a contractor called Newrest which even acquired the catering operation of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the former Orient Express operator, in 2010. There is a Zugführer (i.e. conductor) who checks tickets and performs technical railway tasks. There are also several attendants who make up the beds and serve food. Although the former DB staff were offered new jobs with Newrest, they were reportedly offered less money. Staff are described as multi-skilled, meaning they perform many roles. Staff also get a break between 11 pm and 5 am and likely allows one crew per trip. Like many companies, ÖBB saves money using contractors to staff its Nightjet trains.
Food
While some overnight trains have dining or food service cars, Nightjet does not have them, using the space for revenue-generating passenger cars. Instead, passengers can order mostly pre-packaged foods to eat in their room. Coach passengers must pay for all food and couchette passengers receive water and a Viennese breakfast (a roll, jam and coffee). Sleeper passengers get a welcome drink, evening snack and an À la carte breakfast. To save time on ordering, sleeper passengers check off their breakfast choices on a list. Since there is no food service car, passengers must order from sleeping car attendants.
Routes
Nightjet routes are usually a full-day drive apart, 8-13 hours plus stops and more than 450 miles, although a few routes are shorter such as Munich or Vienna to Venice at 6.5 hours. Since Nightjets leave in the evening and arrive in the morning, connections to day trains are simple as many leave in the morning and depart in the evening. Nightjet operates 20 routes and lists 8 routes from its EuroNight partners. Please see Nightjet Timetables from November 2021 here.
Operations
Nightjet relies on a through coach system which allows one train to serve multiple destinations by branching off at certain stations and combining with trains from other destinations. A train leaving Amsterdam combines with another train from Brussels upon arrival in Bonn. Both trains continue to Würzburg where another train from Hamburg is added for the next leg. In Nürnberg, some coaches are split off to form a train to Vienna. Each section has at least three cars (sleeper, couchette and coach). While more operationally complex than running one train between two cities, the through coach system is cheaper than running a separate train to each destination, especially if demand will not fill an entire train. For day trains, adding and removing cars would significantly slow down journey times, Amtrak takes an hour and a half to combine two sections of the Lakeshore Limited in Albany, but because passengers are asleep, the time lost combining trains does not really matter.
On higher demand routes, Nightjet runs a single train which does not combine with any other such as Vienna-Berlin and Vienna-Zurich. Most trains operate daily although newer routes operate 2-3 times per week to build up demand. Nightjets make between 5-7 stops after their initial departure city and make a similar number in the morning before reaching its destination, allowing many more city pairs to be served than the handful served by flights or high-speed trains.
Bicycle and Auto Service
Nightjet has six spaces on some trains for bicycles. Nightjet also offers automobile and motorcycles transportation services on some routes. While this adds some additional operational complexity, there is not a lot of competition for this service.
Service classes
Rolling stock
Nightjet uses older rolling stock including ex-DB train cars and electric locomotives. The low acquisition cost of ex-DB rolling stock helped convince ÖBB to stay in the sleeper train market as it had been considering whether to discontinue it in 2015 when its own older trainsets needed replacements.
For its new order in 2018, Nightjet consisted of half of ÖBB's order of Siemens Viaggio cars which had 537 purchase options. Nightjet has used its new cars to create a new class of service, mini-suites, which are 28 single-person compartments which can be completely closed off for privacy. Private single-person suites are not a new idea, Budd built the first Slumbercoach in 1956 which had 24 single-person beds stacked on top of each other and both hold up to 40 passengers. More passengers in one car allow for lower fares as the cost of operation is split across more people. More information on train consists on Vagonweb.
Subsidies
ÖBB's reportedly receives a subsidy for some of its services and its Amsterdam extension has even generated a lawsuit. ÖBB has to pay to use the tracks and stations, which represents 10-20% of a night train, and pay an energy tax which airlines avoid. Passengers traveling internationally must also pay a value-added tax of 19%. When state-owned railways operated the trains and maintained the tracks, night trains paid zero track and station access fees. But EU competition rules required state-owned railways to separate their train operations from track maintenance, and even though night trains do not run during congested times, they now must pay for track and station access. ÖBB has argued their impact is so small that such fees are not warranted. Even with a subsidy, the route between Malmo and Brussels did not receive any bids so not all routes are a good fit.
Conclusion
Nightjet works by combining outsourced labor costs and cheap operational costs with higher fares and seating options which cater to a large swathe of a niche market. Three new routes, none of which touch Austria, are in the works, and its success has spawned copycats such as Regiojet in the Czech Republic, and encouraged France's SNCF to restore a night train to Nice and plan for more than a dozen new routes. I wish we had something similar in the US!
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