‘Train pride’: Swedish service joins glorious revival of sleeper travel | Train journeys
On the one hand, who wouldn’t love to shower on a train? On the other hand, if the shower stall is so small that you can’t get back up after you’ve dropped the soap, it might not be such a great idea.
This year sees the glorious resurgence of the sleeper train around Europe, with new routes including Brussels to Prague and Graz, in Austria, to Warsaw. This month, a particularly significant night train – from Hamburg to Stockholm – begins to run. It will be a “game changer”, according to rail travel expert Mark Smith.
But with a summer meeting in Stockholm, I couldn’t afford to wait until September. So I replicated the journey as best I could, to see how the night train feels now it seems to be back. I traveled on an Interrail card from London to Hamburg and then headed to Malmö, from where I boarded the slightly aged sleeper train rattling north on the same route that the new EuroNight service will use.
The service, run by Sweden’s national rail operator SJ, will “get you from London to Stockholm in pretty much 24 hours,” according to Smith, who started the much-consulted website Seat61.com. It will be the “missing link” for travelers from the UK to Sweden, and perhaps persuade many to take the train instead of flying. It starts with Eurostar from St Pancras to Brussels and then switches to a high-speed line to Hamburg, after which speed drops but comfort increases.
EuroNight covers the 670 miles from Hamburg to Stockholm in 13 hours, starting at 21:00 and stopping in Copenhagen, arriving in Stockholm at 10.00.
SJ’s existing sleeping car service from Malmö is quickly over – I only managed four hours of sleep on the six-hour journey. Still, the creaking bunk bed was snug and the gentle rat-a-tat swing was comforting.
In fact, such a journey is too short for a sleeper, but the sleeper Malmö to Stockholm is the best facsimile of the new service. Despite Denmark’s best efforts to derail me (trains stopped across Zealand for three hours after an electrical fire in a critical junction box), I made it across the Öresund rail and road bridge from Copenhagen just in time to join the night train and its vintage , Swedish-built sleeping cars.
The new service will use mothballed carriages from Austrian railways from several years ago. With the demand-driven revival of sleeper services across Europe, SJ has retired them and they are being rebuilt. Train conductor Jeanette Andreasson, who oversaw my journey, told me: “The new sleeping cars are not new [but they are] not as old as these.” She worried, however, that they were a bit narrower than the existing ones.
The renovation may only be skin deep, but they will certainly be better than the Malmö to Stockholm carriages. However, the crowding does not bode well. I’m small, and yet I found it a squeeze to shower in the Swedish-built carts, bending down to pick up spilled soap and struggling to get back up. – You have to soap yourself everywhere and then you are slippery enough not to get stuck, Andreasson laughed.
A private bathroom, albeit a small one, is a luxury on all trains, but on the new service it will only be available as a first class option. Budget travelers can choose a place to snooze in, with the next step up being the space in a sofa bed with six bunk beds (for the first few weeks, the entire service will be sofa bed only).
It’s not yet clear whether you’ll be woken in the night by border guards – staff I spoke to on the train thought they might take care of passports during the journey, but the rail company suggested other arrangements might be necessary – and the journey will end with a breakfast box.
In the meantime, mine ended up at the hotel opposite Stockholm’s central station, where sleeping passengers can pick up a breakfast buffet of cold meats and croissants. There I met, via Zoom, Maja Rosén, one of the founders of the We Stay on the Ground organization that coordinates the “flight free” movement, now with chapters all over the world.
Rosén lives on an island three hours north of Stockholm and has not flown since 2008. Travel, if it must be done at all, should be by train, ferry, on foot or by bicycle, she says. The flight must be curtailed, she believes, otherwise there is not much of a world left to see.
“We have to reduce emissions now, but it’s also about making a statement. Pledge to fly free is a very effective way to make people around you realize that we need to change the way we live. We cannot continue with business as usual, says Rosen. “There are so many ways to explore the world without flying.”
One of the main obstacles is the financial cost, but my trip was not as costly to the planet. According to ecopassenger.org, traveling by train to Stockholm emitted 49 kg of carbon dioxide, while an airplane would emit as much as 380 kg per person. Not only is the fuel used more efficiently, but the EuroNight train will run on renewable energy sources.
Until recently, Swedes were among the dirtiest flyers on the planet. This love affair with aviation is fading fast because the climate crisis is particularly evident in Sweden.
Traveling by train instead of flying certainly feels more virtuous. There is even a Swedish neologism for this feeling: train brag – “train bragging” – or how some, including myself, crow about their long-distance journeys by train when others fly.
Some may consider this virtue signaling. Let them. I will be the one lying flat on my back under Egyptian cotton sheets in a gently rocking sleeper that rolls through Schleswig-Holstein and into the night.
The EuroNight Hamburg to Stockholm service starts on 1 September.