Talk:Sleeper trains

Sleeper trains in Europe
From the current text of this page I get the impression that there are few sleeper train services left in Western Europe, but Wikipedia mentions services in Spain, France, UK and Italy, in addition to the German services to much of Europe. The lines I checked seem to be in operation.

If my impression was correct, I think we should talk about Europe being quite well-covered with sleeper trains, although probably not as well as historically.

--LPfi (talk) 12:43, 13 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Sleeper services are alive west of the old "Iron curtain" yes, but they are just scraping by and are constantly threatened with being shut down. See this question and answer from the EU parliament to the commission. I think we should at the very least alert the dear reader, that something that might have been available last year, may very well have been shut down since and while rail travel in general is having a never before seen surge in popularity, the night train seems to die regardless. Sad though it is. Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:21, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Guide and FTT?
I know it's probably some ways down the line, but what would it take to get on the right track for this to be guide and FTT? Can we write a schedule on this one? Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:21, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Bad news for sleeper trains in Europe, yet again...
http://www.railjournal.com/index.php/main-line/mav-start-to-cut-international-services.html?channel=524 I think they are mentioned in a few city articles. Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:13, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

We're having a discussion about the proper place of a single sentence, apparently
Should this sentence be in the article where User:The dog2 wants it to be or not? Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:46, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The paragraph was about the decline of sleeper trains. That may be true in Europe and Japan, but it's not true everywhere. Like I mentioned, China is a major exception to this since they introduced high-speed sleepers (to date the only ones in the world). The dog2 (talk) 19:56, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The paragraph is about the decline in Europe (mostly) - the sentence immediately preceding is about the problems involving different countries and railroads (not an issue in China which has one railroad except for Hong Kong and Macau). The next paragraph talks about the resurgence of sleeper trains (in Europe) - I do not think a weird one sentence long digression about China fits in that context. Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:02, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree with H that the sentence is malplaced as the wordings are now. Do you know about the rest of the world? I think the best solution would be to talk about the global situation first, with the sentence on China in there, and handle Europe after that. I think that requires most of the Europe paragraphs, more than I am willing to do tonight. –LPfi (talk) 20:18, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I know Japan has only one sleeper train left, even though sleeper trains used to be the backbone of their network. But now the Shinkansen has rendered most sleeper trains obsolete. I know the U.S., Canada and Australia have sleeper trains, but those trains are intended more to be tourist routes than as actual practical options for transportation. I know sleeper trains still exist in Vietnam, Thailand and India, which do not have high-speed trains, and in which most regular people are too poor to afford a plane ticket. China has conventional sleeper trains running parallel to its HSR lines, since there is still a huge income gap; the middle class can probably afford HSR, but the poorer folks can't. And of course, Japan, France and Germany are all much smaller countries, so introducing HSR will make sleeper trains obsolete, while China is much larger, so even with HSR, it still takes almost 10 hours to travel from Shenzhen to Beijing for instance. The dog2 (talk) 20:35, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I think it's a good idea to mention China somewhere in the "Understand" section, for the reasons The dog2 says. Whether it should be in this paragraph or a different one I'm not sure. —Granger (talk · contribs) 17:13, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
 * A sentence very similar to the one under discussion is present in the section of that same article. By all means add a paragraph about other sleeper train systems to the "Understand" section but the sentence under discussion in the position under discussion is detrimental to the flow and seems out of place where it is proposed to be. Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:53, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

European map
File:Map night trains in europe.png was removed as out of date. It seems to be an updatable image though, so I would recommend to update it or watch it for updates. Whether it is useful in the 2020 version is up for debate. It gives an overview, which should be mostly correct, and it is clearly dated. –LPfi (talk) 10:36, 21 February 2024 (UTC)