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European Sleepers - What routes would be feasible?

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Peter Kelford

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The economics of UK sleepers might change when there are almost no internal flights.
Not really, if we look across the channel the French government is looking at at a rail travel time between 2.5 hours and 4 hours as the threshold for no flights.
 
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RT4038

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Not really, if we look across the channel the French government is looking at at a rail travel time between 2.5 hours and 4 hours as the threshold for no flogs.

Quite. I think it highly unlikely that London-Glasgow/Edinburgh or London-Newquay flights would be eliminated any time soon. Even Birmingham-Glasgow/Edinburgh are so close that the outer edge of the threshold that they won't be going either.
The faster journey time afforded by these flights is such that people are just not going to accept being forced into much slower trains. However, HS2 , especially in its most extended form, will reduce some of the flight trade to rail, so possibly fewer flights. No help to Sleepers though!
 

AlbertBeale

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Quite. I think it highly unlikely that London-Glasgow/Edinburgh or London-Newquay flights would be eliminated any time soon. Even Birmingham-Glasgow/Edinburgh are so close that the outer edge of the threshold that they won't be going either.
The faster journey time afforded by these flights is such that people are just not going to accept being forced into much slower trains. However, HS2 , especially in its most extended form, will reduce some of the flight trade to rail, so possibly fewer flights. No help to Sleepers though!

Some people seem to think that flying or not can be a simple choice, and that it can be based on the current pricing of flights - given the ecological crisis we're in, neither of these can stay true for much longer.
 

James James

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The title of the thread is 'What routes would be profitable' ? So, on the basis that a route would only be properly profitable if it can generate sufficient to pay for the ongoing provision of rolling stock, then there are probably none. The use of fully deprecated older rolling stock to start a new service is only anything other than a 'flash in the pan' if there is a chance of the service becoming properly profitable. Particularly as there is not really any source (in any number) of fully depreciated stock going forward, once the current stuff becomes uneconomic to maintain.
Theorising is all well and good, but decision makers clearly don't think the same as you, and I assume they have actual data backing their decisions - judging by the announcements in this thread:
 

Bald Rick

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Some people seem to think that flying or not can be a simple choice, and that it can be based on the current pricing of flights - given the ecological crisis we're in, neither of these can stay true for much longer.

But they will, sorry.
 

AlbertBeale

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But they will, sorry.

I suspect a time will come soon when they won't be able to (on account of taxes and/or regulations) - or, if your pessimism about people's sense of responsibility is correct, and more people and more governments don't wake up to the seriousness of the crisis, and act accordingly, human civilisation in a bearable and recognisable form will be down the tubes in a generation or so.

A fatalistic "they will", seemingly not bothered if that is the case, seems to me to be irresponsible. I think that anyone who considers it likely that people aren't going to change their behaviour should look to what they can do to change that prediction.
 

Bald Rick

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I suspect a time will come soon when they won't be able to (on account of taxes and/or regulations) - or, if your pessimism about people's sense of responsibility is correct, and more people and more governments don't wake up to the seriousness of the crisis, and act accordingly, human civilisation in a bearable and recognisable form will be down the tubes in a generation or so.

A fatalistic "they will", seemingly not bothered if that is the case, seems to me to be irresponsible. I think that anyone who considers it likely that people aren't going to change their behaviour should look to what they can do to change that prediction.

You might think it’s irresponsible. I think it’s realisitc. And no amount of hand wringing prose on these pages is going to change that prediction.

Even the Scotland decarbonisation plan, which is rather ambitious, doesn’t foresee banning aviation or making it more expensive. Rather it is making it net zero carbon.
 

AlbertBeale

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You might think it’s irresponsible. I think it’s realisitc. And no amount of hand wringing prose on these pages is going to change that prediction.

Even the Scotland decarbonisation plan, which is rather ambitious, doesn’t foresee banning aviation or making it more expensive. Rather it is making it net zero carbon.

"Even" the Scotland plan - well, I doubt many people would think the Scottish plans match up to what's actually needed! (And net zero carbon aviation is pie in the sky in the foreseeable future.) If it is realistic that people will be irresponsible/selfish/short-sighted, I despair; if your "realism" turns out to be a true prediction, that doesn't stop what happens being irresponsible. (And what you call "hand wringing" is not my main contribution to trying to ensure we continue to have a half-decent planet...!)
 

Peter Kelford

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And I'd also venture to say that aviation's competitivity is not only limited by cost and eco-friendliness but things like convenience (e.g. hop on a train and glide into [INSERT CITY]'s central station a few hours later and disembark like a normal passenger/cross platforms for a train to a smaller place vs. arrive in a faraway airport, take an hour through landing and another hour in a bus/train/taxi/rental car to get to the city centre.
 

Bald Rick

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And I'd also venture to say that aviation's competitivity is not only limited by cost and eco-friendliness but things like convenience (e.g. hop on a train and glide into [INSERT CITY]'s central station a few hours later and disembark like a normal passenger/cross platforms for a train to a smaller place vs. arrive in a faraway airport, take an hour through landing and another hour in a bus/train/taxi/rental car to get to the city centre.

That works both ways. If you live in Haywards Heath and need to get to Edinburgh, you’ll be hard pushed to beat the convenience of Easyjet from Gatwick.
 

popeter45

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so TEE2.0 is being proposed with night routes also being considered
Wonder how many of these would be feasible
would be fun to see an idea of adding London Thru carriages to some of these potentially? (still would need to solve Boarder check issues so dont really see it ever happening) or at least Timetabled with Eurostar connections in mined
 

Bald Rick

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so TEE2.0 is being proposed with night routes also being considered
Wonder how many of these would be feasible
would be fun to see an idea of adding London Thru carriages to some of these potentially? (still would need to solve Boarder check issues so dont really see it ever happening) or at least Timetabled with Eurostar connections in mined

Rather ambitious! Berlin - Barcelona is 15hours minimum, using the existing high speed lines. Hardly a ‘day train’.
 

MarcVD

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Rather ambitious! Berlin - Barcelona is 15hours minimum, using the existing high speed lines. Hardly a ‘day train’.
One can suppose that most riders won't use the entire route, but only segments of it.
 

JonasB

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One can suppose that most riders won't use the entire route, but only segments of it.

Exactly, and having long routes can have the benefit of giving more people a direct journey instead of having to change trains in some major city.
 

Bald Rick

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One can suppose that most riders won't use the entire route, but only segments of it.

You can be pretty sure about that!

The issue with such long services, though, is that it fixes the times to an early start / late finish, which fixes the timings for all other city pairs, which may not be the best commercially.
 

Peter Kelford

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If anyone wants you can dig through the full proposals at: https://bmvi.de/SharedDocs/EN/Documents/K/innovative-rail-transport-overnight-21-09-2020.pdf - (in English), even has proposed timetables and stock ideas.

Since Berlin to Barcelona got a mention they recon 13h15m - 0600 from Berlin arriving into Barcelona at 1915. And that infrastructure improvements could save another 30 minuets.
Indeed in there there's a very interesting bit on sleepers as well along very much the same sorts of routes. It may be that some additional routes (not via Germany) may also expand the offering one supposes once the viability of TEE2 is indeed proven.
 

Austriantrain

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You can be pretty sure about that!

The issue with such long services, though, is that it fixes the times to an early start / late finish, which fixes the timings for all other city pairs, which may not be the best commercially.

Well, this is the way any long-distance day service operates, and outside of the almost-HS-only countries (France, Spain, etc), those are still very common. Those closer city pairs you mention need several services a day (at least, if there is demand between them; and if not, the whole point does not matter), so the issue you mention rarely arises in reality; the long-distance train is then simply one train among several on the shorter distances.

In „Takt“-countries, the Long-distance services are integrated into the Takt as far as possible.
 

edwin_m

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Well, this is the way any long-distance day service operates, and outside of the almost-HS-only countries (France, Spain, etc), those are still very common. Those closer city pairs you mention need several services a day (at least, if there is demand between them; and if not, the whole point does not matter), so the issue you mention rarely arises in reality; the long-distance train is then simply one train among several on the shorter distances.

In „Takt“-countries, the Long-distance services are integrated into the Takt as far as possible.
That's fine for day trains. Taking the 15hr Berlin-Barcelona as an example, a train could leave Berlin at 0700 and arrive in Barcelona at 2200 and provide a whole range of useful journeys between places along the way.

But if it leaves at 1900 and arrives at 1000 it can only really do that for places that are within two or three hours of each end of the journey. Anywhere else would be served at a very unsocial hour of the night, and if the boarding or alighting is at say 0200 then nearly everyone will opt for a daytime train or a flight instead. So the sleeper will have to justify itself based on a much more limited range of journeys.

It's even worse for sleepers that are closer to the optimum overnight journey time of 10-12hr. All of the intermediate stops on those are probably at very unattractive times, so realistically the train provides only one journey opportunity.

In some cases it may be possible to get round this problem by attaching and detaching portions at the main intermediate stations. But this incurs extra time and cost and risks waking up the sleeping passengers, and the stations in question have to have platforms spare where the sleepers can be parked before or after their journey. Also it can only cater for a few intermediate journeys - there just aren't enough coaches in the train to cover all permutations for a train that makes more than a couple of intermediate stops.
 

Bald Rick

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Well, this is the way any long-distance day service operates, and outside of the almost-HS-only countries (France, Spain, etc), those are still very common. Those closer city pairs you mention need several services a day (at least, if there is demand between them; and if not, the whole point does not matter), so the issue you mention rarely arises in reality; the long-distance train is then simply one train among several on the shorter distances.

In „Takt“-countries, the Long-distance services are integrated into the Takt as far as possible.

Indeed, but for the Barcelona - Berlin example, if you are short of common sense and want to go end to end, or even to points an hour or two of the end, you have one train a day and it’s at a time that will not be convenient for most people.
 

Peter Kelford

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Indeed. In actual fact if one looks at the stopping pattern for that train the last leg and the first leg are reasonably served by other trains as well.
 

Austriantrain

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Indeed, but for the Barcelona - Berlin example, if you are short of common sense and want to go end to end, or even to points an hour or two of the end, you have one train a day and it’s at a time that will not be convenient for most people.

So what? A Berlin-Barcelona day train serves enough decently sized cities that it will be full along its entire trip. Provided of course that it is integrated into national timetables and, above all, ticketing systems (no „special tickets, reservation only“ absurdities).
 

edwin_m

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So what? A Berlin-Barcelona day train serves enough decently sized cities that it will be full along its entire trip. Provided of course that it is integrated into national timetables and, above all, ticketing systems (no „special tickets, reservation only“ absurdities).
That's probably true for a day train, but not for an overnight, which is the topic for this discussion.
 

Mag_seven

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As has been pointed out this thread is to discuss feasible routes for European sleepers. For discussion on the TEE proposal see this thread:


Thank you
 

37201xoIM

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And if one is back to sleepers, it's worth repeating that the range of potential markets and tolerable journey times is of course much greater than the 4-ish hours perceived to be the case for day trains (though with increased hassle of flying and Flygskam et al. this number appears to have been rising anyway, pre-Covid). But yes, slightly differently from day trains, sleepers need to have more obvious big locations at (or near) the start or end of their run, unlike the "string of pearls" approach that can justify a good TEE / EC route.
 

edwin_m

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And if one is back to sleepers, it's worth repeating that the range of potential markets and tolerable journey times is of course much greater than the 4-ish hours perceived to be the case for day trains (though with increased hassle of flying and Flygskam et al. this number appears to have been rising anyway, pre-Covid). But yes, slightly differently from day trains, sleepers need to have more obvious big locations at (or near) the start or end of their run, unlike the "string of pearls" approach that can justify a good TEE / EC route.
The ideal journey time for a sleeper is probably in the range of 8 to 12hr. So it's a wider range than a sleeper but the longer travel time almost always means there will be fewer people wanting to travel between a particular city pair. This is because the journey is more time-consuming and costly, but also because the further somewhere is the fewer reasons people have to go there (holidays an exception to some extent). So, as I've suggested previously, it's quite challenging to find a pair of cities about the right distance apart that have enough population and mutual affinity to generate a train's worth of passenger each night.

There's potentially also a range of journeys between about 4hr and about 8hr that are too long for a day train to be competitive but too short for a sleeper. However if the day train is high speed this gap shrinks considerably and maybe disappears completely.
 

Bald Rick

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The ideal journey time for a sleeper is probably in the range of 8 to 12hr. So it's a wider range than a sleeper but the longer travel time almost always means there will be fewer people wanting to travel between a particular city pair. This is because the journey is more time-consuming and costly, but also because the further somewhere is the fewer reasons people have to go there (holidays an exception to some extent). So, as I've suggested previously, it's quite challenging to find a pair of cities about the right distance apart that have enough population and mutual affinity to generate a train's worth of passenger each night.

There's potentially also a range of journeys between about 4hr and about 8hr that are too long for a day train to be competitive but too short for a sleeper. However if the day train is high speed this gap shrinks considerably and maybe disappears completely.

Indeed. And 8-12h at sleeper speeds* is 500-750 miles. Which is 3-5 hours in day train terms where high speed lines exist for most of the journey.

*Max 80mph, stopping every hour or so for crew or commercial stops, pathing time for engineering works overnight etc.
 
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