Back in June 2021, a company in France called Midnight Trains launched its ‘Hotel on rails‘ project for luxury night train services worthy a hotel experience. Every Friday, Midnight Trains sends a newsletter with some sort of update on its project.

Midnight Trains will first focus on organising night trains to Nice, Barcelona, Venice, Milan… the Mediterranean Sea. The French sleeper company announced this in its Friday 3 November 2023 newsletter. The operator is abandoning the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark and Portugal for now.

“If you’ve been reading our newsletter for a while now, you’ll know that we’re facing a number of hurdles. We’ve been reviewing them over the course of the last eight newsletters, and we’ve got our eye on the solutions to work around them, fix them, or adapt to them”, Nicolas Bargelès from Midnight Trains writes.

“Let’s start with the network and the establishment of our first lines. Before opening a single line, we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were capable of doing it. Ultimately, we want to establish a large European network of night trains that offer an alternative to short and medium-haul flights in Europe. We want it to be accessible and modern.”

Byebye London

“To determine which lines to begin with — based on major air travel markets — it was a process of elimination. First for the chop: London. The fire resistance rules for materials are just too demanding for the moment, and would require us to redesign our carriages. As for going further than London, to somewhere like Edinburgh, we’d have to completely change our rolling stock, to adapt to the format of British train tracks. We’re not abandoning this market by any means, it’s not the best one to kick off with. Consider it postponed indefinitely.”

“Then there’s the Paris-Berlin – Paris-Copenhagen line, for which the train would split into two parts. It’s a medium-sized market, and a very long route. It definitely has potential, but it’s not the best line to prove the relevance and effectiveness of our model.” 

Competition

“Especially since SNCF and Deutsche Bahn will restart this route from December 11th”, Bergelès concedes.

“One to park for later – probably when the 20km of the The Fehmarn Belt is finished. In fact, the Hamburg-Copenhagen straight line is quite short. Historically, trains did the crossing on ferries, because it was faster than going over land. We think the market is maturing and soon enough, we hope to address it with our trains.”

Distance

“Finally, the last market to eliminate: Portugal and Spain (with the exception of Barcelona and Madrid).”

“Put simply, Portugal is very far away. Also, there are no plans to install standard gauge tracks, and it’s too early to say when that might be on the horizon. Spain is closer to France, but track gauge is also questionable. Barcelona is easily accessible from the French border, while Madrid can be reached easily thanks to its high speed ​​lines.”

So now? 

“Now that we’ve eliminated lines, a solution is becoming clearer: our first lines should depart from Paris to go towards the Mediterranean”, Bargelès writes.

“By comparing these network constraints with the addressable markets, we’ve come to the conclusion that our first lines will be: Paris-Venice via Milan, Paris-Rome via Florence, Paris-Barcelona, ​​Paris-Madrid and Paris-Nice. The first three are the routes we’d always planned our trains would take – to be honest, they’ve been at the heart of the Midnight Trains mission since the start.”

Côte d’Azur

“The new addition to the Paris-Mediterranean axis at initial launch is Paris-Madrid. As for Paris-Nice, we hadn’t actually envisioned it, and we only had the idea because we wanted to operate international night trains. However, it emerged there was growing demand for a route from the French capital down to Nice, despite competition from the SNCF. One question remains though: the order we schedule these lines to launch. But we will have to wait a little longer to find that out.”

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