I often just give up.
In that sense, flying somehow feels like a much more standardised and straightforward experience, despite a ton of different ticketing websites, airlines and airports which all have their own apps and gates and conditions etc, too.
Buy one ticket, and it asks you for money, the bill slot opens, you put money in, the bill slot closes, the ticket prints, and then the change return door opens. After you take your change, the change return door closes.
If you buy 4 tickets: it asks you for money, the bill slot opens, you put money in, the bill slot closes, the first ticket prints, and then the change return door opens, you take you change and then it closes. Then, the bill slot opens and closes, the second ticket prints, then the change return door opens and closes (repeat 2 more times). I know just the type of “meets the requirements” engineers that made this.
In the UK, experiences vary. The new Caledonian Sleeper (London-Highlands) is apparently a pretty rubbish experience. However, I took the Night Riviera (London - Cornwall) a few years ago and found it a pretty good experience even though I very nearly missed my stop in Truro. The problem for a business traveller is that you would need a shower.
The other problem facing the Caledonian sleeper is that London-Glasgow is only something like 4 hours and the day trains are very good. The same is not so true for getting out to Cornwall.
In my experience it was a near perfect form of travel. Arrive at a train station long after most people had gone home, board the train and fall asleep, wake up at the platform very early the next day. You lose practically no 'useful' time.*
The one thing which stopped us making use of it more frequently was the cost. It was generally more expensive than flying, much more expensive than driving and even more so now that we have a child.
* In fairness, it's pretty loud and not massively comfortable so if you are a light sleeper you might not get the full magic carpet effect.
While I'm happy to spend a little more for the sake of the environment we're talking something like 3-5x more expensive.
Trains from Paddington to Truro run every hour, taking around 4h30m.
https://traintimes.org.uk/london/truro/09:30/today
Considering its 1/3 the distance from London to Glasgow it's quite slow, but it's still faster than driving.
It's also ideal for getting a full day of work in either London/Glasgow and returning. Doing that by plane is also possible but is environmentally horrible and taxing, doing it by train eats into good chunks of the days either side.
I think just betting on companies going for the better option carbon-wise won't be enough, it also needs price parity (or better) and more convenience than taking the plane
Makes one wonder what it would do to the economics of train transportation if maintenance work was required to be carried out during daytime and passenger transportation was optimised for comfortable sleeper trains.
Trains work best when the track is used. That means trains need to leave often to keep the track busy. Leave at 9pm, and arrive at 7am sounds great, but you don't get anyone leaving at 2am, which means there isn't enough users to pay for all the infrastructure needed.
Day trains work because some people leave at 8am, some noon, some 6pm... You need enough riders to fill to 70% capacity 3 trains per hour for 13 hours a day just to break even on all the costs of running a train for a reasonable price. (the numbers are approximate and depend strongly on local details). The more often you can run nearly full trains the better. Your night trains can't do this.
It only seems useful if you're Paris based, since this appears to be the center node of the network.
edit: This at least appears to be the case for the French startup mentioned and the map displayed at the very top of the article.
https://www.nightjet.com/dam/jcr:6a8041cb-0131-4ad3-84fd-251...
The biggest issue is that they tend to be booked up weeks in advance so getting a slot in private compartment is pretty hard.
That’s France’s rail network in a nutshell. It’s great, if your trip starts or ends in Paris. If you’re not, you might still go through Paris and driving could be faster than a high-speed train.
The other issue with domestic sleeper networks in France, other than sounding like a terrorist, is that high speed trains usually take 3-4h anyway.
I think the only takers for an overnight equivalent would be tourists that can save a night of stay somewhere. And that’s if you’re not staying with family or friends.
And the trains are almost all electric, so it’s harder to make an argument for “slower, therefore less carbon burn”.
First, if you look at Europe as a whole, you will see that sleeper trains were never really dead. There are plenty of them in Germany and Eastern Europe. Often they go from large cities to holiday destinations and therefore are mainly used by people travelling for leisure.
The novelty of these new lines (be it this company or the transeuropean effort to connect european capitals with sleeper trains) is that they mostly travel business travellers, people who would usually have taken a place. As plane journeys are often the largest item in a company carbon account, they are betting that some will push their employees towards the train.
It might not be easy however. Track capacity at night is often severly limited by maintenance work in France for example and these trains will have to compete with rail freight transport at a time when Europe wants to massively develop rail freight.