Bloomberg Pursuits: Trains, not planes or automobiles, ticket to European treks
Stock photo Julia Kadel
June 1, 2021
PARIS — At exactly 8:52 pm on May 20, a sleeper train pulled out of the Austerlitz station in Paris with French Prime Minister Jean Castex on board, to make its inaugural 12-hour, overnight journey to Nice. A flight connecting the cities is normally an hour and a half, but instead, Castex and about a hundred passengers spent the night on couchette berths, before pulling into the French Riviera city in time for an ocean-front croissant and café crème breakfast the next morning along the Promenade des Anglais.
After going offline more than three years ago, the relaunch of the Paris-Nice route is part of an ambitious push to resurrect night trains across Europe, swapping carbon-guzzling short-haul flights in favor of longer, but more sustainable, overnight rail journeys. Despite the more cutting-edge developments of high-speed bullet trains and hypersonic planes as of late, France is not alone in investing in this slower form of travel.Also in In May, the Austrian sleeper train the Nightjet launched its Vienna to Amsterdam service; by next year, the Dutch start-up European Sleeper plans to launch new overnight services connecting Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague. And over the next several years, a long-term collaboration between Western Europe’s many national rail companies will connect major cross-border cities including Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, and Berlin via night trains.
The collective effort is a keystone of the 2019 European Green Deal, which sets to cut transportation emissions across the continent by 90%, as part of a larger goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050.
