Champagne on the Night Train: Sleeper Car Shenanigans

Are you a die-hard traveler who feels bad about your carbon emissions? Wondering if the railway renaissance underway in Europe is the solution to a modest percentage of your guilt?

Well, I checked out the Nightjet experience this spring, and I’m here to give you the lowdown on this memorable alternative to air travel. Europe has been expanding its night train services across the continent, in part as a response to climate change, and so we figured this would be a more fun way to get from Venice to Prague than taking (shudder) RyanAir.

Credit: Simon Tartarotti

The first rule of sleeper car travel is this: don’t forget about the entire day before.

If you’ve got a ticket on the night train, chances are you’re going to be checking out of your hotel much, much earlier that day. Got a plan for what you’re going to do, and specifically, what you’re going to do with your luggage? Well, figure one out. My intrepid spouse and I planned to use one of Venice’s many luggage storage services before spending our last day cavorting about the city; it took us a couple of tries to find one with available space. We also wore ourselves out a bit, and with nowhere to rest or relax in the evening, we ended up spending maybe more time than we wanted in Venice’s less-than-luxurious train station.

But, soon enough, our platform was announced, and as we have been trained (ha) to do in Italy, we scurried for our car as fast as we could go. This is where we ran into our first problem: we (and the other passengers) were so speedy, we got onto our car before the conductor did, and he had the keys to the rooms. Related problem: there is only enough room in the train corridors for one person to stand, with luggage, and that just barely. If you board the train, and your compartment is further down than the one assigned to the person in front of you, and no one can get into their compartments yet… well, you can’t get there from here. I ended up all the way at the other end of the car from our assigned compartment so a very small lady with a very large suitcase could realize this wasn’t even her correct car, and then I couldn’t get back to our compartment until everyone else had been let into theirs.

But! Minor hassles aside, we soon discovered the tiny, extremely efficient world of the Nightjet Deluxe (!) sleeper car.

This is the entirety of the space we had to “move around” in. (We paid for a compartment with our own bathroom, which is behind the door on the right and took up most of the open space.) Nightjet has been pretty crafty about making use of every available inch of space in these cars, but it definitely takes a bit of getting used to, and bumping around and over each other as you try to figure out where to put yourself and your stuff.

This would be a delightfully comfortable experience for one person. For two of us, we made it work just fine, although it’s best to only do this with someone you can change clothes in front of. Each of these compartments holds three berths, however, and I cannot imagine how you could possibly fit three people and their luggage in here unless they are three children standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat.

After fussing around for a bit, and tripping over ourselves, we met the attendant, who came by with a breakfast menu and a little something to start the trip off correctly.

Photo a bit blurry? So was the train ride.

We also learned that, thanks to what I presume is the famous German efficiency, the trip would be taking only about eight and a half hours instead of the usual eleven - meaning that, instead of rolling into Vienna around 8am and catching the next train to Prague, we’d be getting in at closer to 6am.

This is kind of an area where you don’t want efficiency, necessarily; a 6am arrival means a lot less sleep, and we ended up declining the breakfast that was going to be served at 5:15am. So in some ways we didn’t get to have the full sleeper car experience, because we basically needed to go to bed almost immediately if we were going to get anything resembling a decent night’s sleep.

I volunteered to take the top bunk, and we then spent some time decoding the system of straps and netting that my husband called “der splattenprevention.” I would have loved to spend a bit of time lounging up there with my champagne split, but we were already looking at less than seven hours of sleep by that point, and mama needs her beauty sleep. I chugged my Champers and we called it a night.

It wasn’t the best sleep I’ve ever had on a train; the movement was a bit, let’s say, lurchy, and I tended to pop awake at those movements, despite use of a rather powerful sleeping pill. But it got us from Venice to Vienna without taking up a valuable day of our trip, and at about $300 for the compartment, it was certainly less than two plane tickets and a hotel would have been. We were also delighted to discover that we got in so early we could catch a much earlier train to Prague, and so we were traipsing its lovely cobblestoned streets by noon.

All in all, I’d recommend the night trains to anyone who’s looking for a bit of cost and time efficiency, a lot of space efficiency, and a way to cut back on plane travel. (Especially budget European plane travel. I’m looking at you, RyanAir and EasyJet.) Although there were a few inconveniences, it was a fun and interesting way to get from Point A to Point B. I’m looking forward to seeing how Europe leans in to this concept as they put more night trains into service, and as long as they have some champagne for me, you can count me as a fan of the sleeper car.