IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 4

For most of the twentieth century the sleeper train was the ordinary way to cross Europe overnight. A traveller boarded in one capital after dinner and stepped onto a platform in another before breakfast, having paid for a bed and a journey at the same time. By the year 2000 almost all of these services had been withdrawn. Budget airlines had made the same trip cheaper and faster, and the rolling stock was expensive to maintain and idle for most of the day.

The economics were genuinely poor, and it is worth being precise about why. A sleeping car carries perhaps thirty passengers where a seated carriage carries eighty, so the revenue per metre of train is low. The train occupies a track slot at night when maintenance crews want it, and it crosses borders, which historically meant separate agreements, separate staff and separate ticketing systems in every country it passed through. None of that is romantic, and none of it went away.

What changed was not the arithmetic but the alternative. Aviation taxes rose across several European states, and a measurable number of travellers began to choose ground transport on climate grounds — a shift visible first in Sweden, where a word for the feeling of shame about flying entered general use. Austrian Federal Railways, which had quietly kept its sleeper fleet, bought second-hand carriages from German operators that were disposing of theirs and expanded the network under the name Nightjet.

The revival has been uneven, and the failures are instructive. Routes that work tend to connect two large cities roughly ten to twelve hours apart, because the journey has to fill a night without wasting a day. Anything shorter arrives inconveniently early; anything much longer competes with a flight plus a hotel and loses. Several relaunched services covering the wrong distance closed within two years, and the operators generally attributed this to the timetable rather than to a lack of demand.

Rolling stock remains the binding constraint. A modern sleeping car costs several million euros, takes years to deliver, and cannot be ordered in small numbers economically. Most current services therefore run refurbished carriages built in the 1990s or earlier, which limits both capacity and comfort, and comparisons drawn with hotel accommodation are correspondingly unflattering. New builds have been ordered, but the first deliveries were repeatedly delayed.

The wider lesson is about what infrastructure a continent chooses to keep. The tracks, the stations and the border agreements that make a night train possible were not rebuilt; they were retained, largely by accident, in the few countries that never quite finished closing their services. Where they were fully dismantled, restarting has proved far harder than the timetable alone suggests, which is an argument for maintaining capacity that is not currently profitable.