11995 — The last golden hour
Dozens of services a night.
In 1995, you could sleeper from Paris to Vienna, from
Madrid to Rome, from Copenhagen to Basel, from
Moscow to Nice.
Deutsche Bahn ran CityNightLine. SNCF ran the Talgo to Madrid. Europe’s overnight
network was, by any measure, the most developed in the world.
Then the budget airlines arrived.
This dataset, 1995: 18 active routes. The true peak was larger —
counters here are honest to what’s on the map, not to the full historical network.
22000–2014 — The long dismantling
Routes go dark, one by one.
Ryanair’s route count tripled between 2002 and 2008. easyJet doubled. A flight
from Paris to Barcelona cost €29 and took two hours; the sleeper
cost €110 and took twelve.
Deutsche Bahn dropped CityNightLine in 2016 after decades of subsidy fights. Thello,
the Paris–Venice operator, closed in 2020. The Moscow–Nice service —
revived by RZD in 2010 in a gesture of rail diplomacy — ran its last train in
2020 during lockdown.
Each amber line fades to crimson as the service dies. The counter reads this
dataset’s 2015 state — a mix of soon-to-close CNL flagships and
newer post-2000 services (Thello, Paris–Moscow, Zurich–Rome) that were
still running.
32016 — Austria picks up the pieces
ÖBB buys the discarded rolling stock.
In late 2016, Austria’s national operator ÖBB acquired the night-train fleet
Deutsche Bahn was retiring. They rebranded it Nightjet.
Over the next eight years, they relaunched routes DB had abandoned —
Hamburg–Zurich, Vienna–Brussels, Amsterdam–Zurich — and bought
new rolling stock for the first time in a decade.
The inflection is visible in the data.
42020 — Flygskam, pandemic, subsidy
Climate shame meets cheap capital.
Swedish flygskam — flight shame — became a word in 2019. The
pandemic grounded short-haul aviation in 2020. EU recovery funds prioritized rail.
France banned domestic flights on routes under 2.5 hours where a train alternative
existed.
Between 2020 and 2024, new overnight services launched across Europe
— 10 of them in this dataset. Most ran at capacity from week
one.
52025 — A cautious revival
Half of what we had. Maybe better than what we had.
The 2025 network has 24 nightly services in this dataset —
roughly half of the 1995 count, drawn from the same 40 routes.
The routes that returned are different. They’re longer, more often state-backed,
priced closer to full-fare intercity than to the old budget-sleeper model.
Berlin–Paris came back in 2023.
Stockholm–Brussels launched in 2024 and sold its first month
in a week.
There is an argument — not a universal one — that what survived is what
mattered.