In their weekly Friday at midnight newsletter, Midnight Trains have announced it their “death”. The French company wanted to start a ‘hotel on rails’ upscale night train ser…
Just put less rows of seats and have them properly recline. Some people will want small rooms, but cheap sleeper seats help as well. People sleep in planes too.
The quality of sleep you get in a reclining seat will be well below that of a fully horizontal sleeper bunk. Unless it’s one of those first-class airline pod seats which reclines all the way, though those take up more space than compartments of sleeper bunks, and only exist because of aviation safety requirements which don’t apply on railways.
You’re essentially paying for a hotel that transports you to a different city by next morning, as if by magic. You can have a full day’s work or sightseeing, eat dinner, board your train and get a reasonable night’s sleep, waking up to have another full day at your destination.
There's already a company doing this, with lines already going. European sleeper! Night trains with private cabins and beds between Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague
Right, Midnight Trains was a French company trying to create a European night train network that centred on France, specifically on Paris. I think they found out the hard way that for various reasons, as they detailed in their blog, France might not be the best country in which to organise such a company; it also might have been simply too ambitious of a project for the current market.