In an age of ever-faster trains connecting major cities globally, is there any future for anachronistic night trains with sleeping cars? Why, yes!
In the old days you used to be
able to travel long and relatively short distances on overnight trains, either
in coach or a comfy sleeping compartment.
On the New Haven Railroad you could board your train at Grand Central
before midnight and awake the next morning in Boston, Cape Cod or
Montreal. It was like combining the cost
of travel and a hotel in one package.
Accommodations in the sleeper
cars ranged from upper or lower berths to single roomettes and even drawing
rooms… in addition to the joys of trying to sleep sitting in a reclining,
albeit cheaper, coach seat.
Fast forward to the
introduction of Amtrak in 1971 and in the US the overnight trains continued,
albeit with less luxurious sleeping options.
At one point Amtrak restored sleeper service on the Boston to Washington
“Night Owl” (affectionately called The Night Crawler because of its slow speeds
and multiple stops) with an added twist.
A New York “Executive
Sleeper” car was added to and from Washington DC,
which could be boarded in NYC as early as 9:30 pm. While you slept the car was coupled to the southbound
through train and left trackside in DC’s Union Station until 8 am.
“The Night Owl” service resumed last year from Boston to Washington but minus the NYC sleeper’s pick-up and drop-off. There was only one sleeping car and it wasn’t cheap: $284 for a roomette, $376 for a bedroom, one way. Alas, the Amtrak timetable now says that train has been cancelled for the moment due to COVID, but it may come back.
Of course, long distance
Amtrak trains have always depended on sleeping cars given the length of their
journey: New York to Chicago is 19 hours
and from The Windy City to LA takes another 43 hours. Yes, they offer coach seating but sleeping
car passengers get “free” meals and access to onboard showers.
But the real growth in
overnight trains is, ironically, happening on the continent with some of the
world’s fastest trains: Europe.
There are renewed overnight trains between Berlin and Sweden, Scotland and London and from Vienna to 25 destinations in Italy, Germany and France on the Austrian
So, night trains still make
sense, especially using underutilized tracks during the overnight hours. And given European concerns over global
warming, fuel-efficient trains have a great future compared to flying. In France they’ve even banned
short-haul domestic flights where trains offer a much
“greener” alternative.
1 comment:
William Malone of New Canaan writes:
The night sleepers from Washington to Boston were significant contributions
to our government, in that they permitted John Dunlap and other professors from
Harvard to commute from Boston to Washington. I used to make weekly trips from
Washington to New York, although in later years crime on the track level at Penn Station
meant that sleeper passengers had to check in with the station master, who walked them to
the locked sleeper car. The Mountaineers enable passengers to ride between Montreal
and Vancouver on equipment bought from the Canadian National, and then passengers
are put up in the grand railroad hotels en route so as to benefit from the scenery in daylight.
Several days a week the Mountaineer was extended south to Seattle, where it
connected with an AMTRAK sleeper to Sacramento and then to Chicago and then the
Lake Shore Limited to Boston and Penn Station. One of the more interesting sleeper
runs was the three-days-a-week Cardinal from Penn Station to Chicago via the late
Harley Staggers’ district in West Virginia. In June reservations were hard to get because
every little mountain town it stopped at had a college which brought back alumni for
commencement. AMTRAK’s lack of marketing sense was demonstrated by their
substitution of boxed meals for chefs and cloth tablecloths in the dining cars east of
the Mississippi. I can’t speak to the Florida runs, although my neighbors minimized their
exposure to Covid by taking a sleeper to and from Florida. A few years ago I bicycled
between Miami and Key West along the Flagler scenic right-of-way, which would have been
a great way to travel until the hurricane of 1935.
malone@alum.mit.edu
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