“You can get on the train, you sleep, you wake up in another city the next day. If it all works out, then you have a nice way of travelling.” 

On a balmy September evening, Astrid Naundorf hefts her cycle onto a night train headed towards Berlin from Paris’s Gare de l’Est. Although the process was not entirely smooth for the German traveller, with a technical glitch leading to her being assigned a seat rather than a sleeping berth, Naundorf was still enthusiastic about the process. “This experience was kind of bad”, she said, “but in general it’s a good idea”.

However, this is far from the only reason travellers opt for international night trains in Europe. “It’s a choice,” said Emma Steininger, a young Austrian traveller boarding the same train. “I would rather take the train than a plane, it’s an ecological question for me,” she added, despite the higher costs associated with this choice. For Alma Poussielgue, it’s a matter of practicality. “I’m moving to Berlin, I’ve got a lot of luggage and this is the simplest alternative for me,” said the 21-year-old French student. 

These passengers don’t know that the train line they are about to take will soon stop running.

The Paris-Berlin and Paris-Vienna lines of the Nightjet night train service, run in partnership with the national rail companies of France, Germany and Austria, will come to a grinding halt on December 14, 2025. This comes after AFP reported that the French government decided to withhold around €10 million in subsidies from national rail provider SNCF amid budgetary concerns. This makes the service “not economically viable”, the company said in a statement.

A ‘success story’ cut down before its prime?

This decision came as a shocking development for night train regulars, given that the train line recorded an average occupancy rate of 70% in 2024. Some of them gathered to protest the decision at the Gare de l’Est and at Vienna’s train station, teddy bears in hand, hoping to rescue the train line. A petition to keep the service going, launched by the association “Yes to the Night Train”, has received over 92,000 signatures, as of publication.

Activists and members of civil society have deplored the move since it was announced. “It’s a really bad development, because [the night train service] allowed users to avoid flights by opting to travel through the night,” said Victor Thévenet, Rail Programme Manager at the NGO Transport & Environment. “The French state and the SNCF did not give it the resources for it to become a success story,” he added.

However, it may not be game over for Paris’s tryst with international night trains just yet. A sub-committee of the French National Assembly approved an amendment to the 2026 budget bill which would allocate a subsidy worth €5 million to the SNCF, dedicated to the night train lines. 

Private players may be the new hope for European night trains

In the meantime, private operators are looking to fill in the gap. The Belgian-Dutch cooperative company European Sleeper announced plans to restart the Paris-Berlin night train line from March 2026 onwards, with tickets set to go on sale on December 16, 2025.

Though there isn’t an official count, Europe has some 150 night train lines criss-crossing the continent (not accounting for Belarus, Ukraine and Russia), according to Back-on-track.eu, a NGO advocating for the development of more night train lines across the EU. 

This figure, in itself, is far from constant. In the 2010s, for example, travellers could use night train services to voyage between Rome and Paris on a route that no longer exists. For a country that continues to operate eight night train lines within its borders, the soon-to-cease Paris-Berlin and Paris-Vienna lines are the only international night train services SNCF runs today.

In the current context, the Austrian train company ÖBB and Romania’s CFR are leading the revival of night train services across Europe. According to Transport & Environment’s 2024 analysis comparing data from 27 train operators across the continent, the two providers collectively run services on 50 night train routes.

“There are now night trains that run regularly from Germany through Denmark to Sweden,” says Jon Worth, an independent railway consultant and advocate for night trains across Europe. “Those were not running a few years ago. That's progress.” 

At the same time, the European night train project is not running on full steam. “Ultimately, there is untapped demand for night trains, especially in Western Europe”, Worth adds, referring to the situation in France and in Spain, where no night trains have run since 2020.

“It’s very complicated to run a cross-border night train”

Given that more travellers in Europe are looking for more eco-friendly alternatives to short-haul flights, why is it harder to find options that satisfy their wishes? What are the obstacles that stand in their way? 

“It’s very complicated to run a cross-border night train”, says Laurent Guihéry, Professor in Transport Science at the CY Cergy Paris University. This is owing to a range of factors, including the lack of complete interoperability between national railway systems, route-specific obstacles and the costs associated with operating night trains.

“Sometimes, operators are forced to change a train’s engine after crossing national borders,” he adds, highlighting another hitch in the system that makes running international night trains more difficult.

In France, night train services are forced to navigate around nighttime renovation and refurbishment works on train tracks. “The reality of the Paris-Vienna service is that the train never takes the same route. Sometimes, the train runs via Metz, while in other journeys it passes through Nancy,” says Guihéry.

Cooperation between national rail companies, or the lack thereof, can make the implementation of cross-border train routes more difficult. “Running a train across a border in central Europe is an absolutely normal thing to do,” says Worth. “You run trains across the border all the time anyway … so you are used to working with and collaborating with the railway on the other side of the border.” 

While this communication takes place smoothly when a train runs in central Europe, Worth says that this becomes much harder when neighbouring train operators don’t get along with each other. “SNCF has a very bad relationship with [Italy’s] trenitalia”, says Worth. As a result, “nothing happens, nothing runs” between the two countries.

Eco-friendly, but is it profitable?

Aside from the technical and logistical obstacles, the biggest question that weighs over international night train services is that of profitability. A seat in a high-speed daytime train service can be sold “up to four times” per day, estimates SNCF, while a berth on an overnight service “can only be sold once”. Add to that operational costs, like track access charges (i.e., the fees paid by train operators to use railway networks) or the charges linked with buying or renting train carriages, which makes it harder for night train services to break even.

“The tolls imposed for using the railway are extremely high in France and Spain,” says Transport & Environment’s Thévenet. “The night train business model is still a work in progress. It needs support,” he adds, advocating for a dedicated reduction in track access charges for night trains. 

These concerns partially explain the reticence of some legacy train operators towards developing night train services over high-speed daytime train lines. “You’re never going to become as rich from running night trains as you will from running high-speed daytime trains,” says Worth. 

However, profitability should not be the only concern on national train operators’ minds, Worth contends. “If you can run a train service from Paris to Madrid … and not make a loss well, you should do it, right? Because you'll get planes out of the sky and you'll get cars off the road.” Furthermore, the development of night trains and high-speed daytime trains can complement each other to achieve this goal, he adds.

Some private-sector challengers have tried their hand to fill the gap in the night train space - with varying degrees of success. The French start-up Midnight Trains, founded in 2020, made big headlines for its Paris-Venice night train proposal, rubber-stamped by the European Commission. The project was officially abandoned in June 2024 after it failed to meet its fundraising target. “There’s nothing on offer for new companies entering the railway space”, said Adrien Aumont, one of Midnight Train’s co-founders. “The authorities need to provide incentives or mechanisms to mitigate risk if they want economic agents to be interested in new markets.”

“The price to enter the sector is very high” when it comes to night trains, explains Professor Guihéry at CY Cergy Paris University, with sleeper wagons and railway material stock costing a pretty penny. They are also extremely hard to come by, both brand-new and on second-hand markets, says Worth, which hinder the development of night train services. 

Running a night train service as a private player may be difficult, but it is not impossible. Case in point: European Sleeper, the Belgo-Dutch cooperative company which announced its Paris-Berlin night train from March 2026 onwards, has been successfully running a night train line linking Brussels to Berlin and Prague since 2023.

“The European Union should have a strategy”

Making train tolls cheaper for night trains, reducing the VAT applied on them in certain countries, securing EU-level financing for a pool of sleeper train wagons that could be rented out to both private and public train operators, improving the administration of cross-border train lines at the European level - these are but some of the many solutions floated by NGOs and activists to help develop the intercontinental night train network.

“You can overcome any of the technical problems if you want to,” says Worth, but political willpower is key. “National governments and national railway companies are not that interested in night trains because they don't make much money and they are complicated to run.” 

What could make the difference, he believes, is a push at the EU level. “The European Union should have a strategy”. 
 

Emilie Delwarde

Translated by Tanishk Saha