Travelski Night Express: a review
Melancholic thoughts on the state of European night trains in 2026
It’s 21:40 on a Saturday and I’m sitting in a dimly lit waiting room. It’s a snowy, cold winter evening outside but warm inside, where myself, a friend and 5-10 other people are waiting for a night train. The smell of sweat and stale beer lingers around the room, which has plenty of power sockets, but uncomfortable seating, bordering on hostile to the customer - not unsurprising when it comes to the French railway operator. Large signs around the room say that people without a valid titre de transport may not be allowed there, but nobody comes around to check. I’ve been sat here for an hour: I took the last bus down from Val Thorens, which cost me €10 and took an hour. The way up had taken six, so I am just happy to be here.
The infrastructure is old but functional. It clearly has not been touched in a while: it’s Moutiers–Salins–Brides-les-Bains railway station, which serves a sleepy town in the French alps. Travellers flock here in droves during the ski season on speedy TGVs and Eurostars alongside less speedy TERs. Timetabling is expectedly French: no sign of takt, or a predictable clockface-timetable, with departures and arrivals scattered around seemingly at random, concentrated mostly on the mornings and the late afternoons.
I look for food: my best bet is Istanbul Kebab, where I get myself the same kebab I would in Berlin, Prague or Budapest, except I can get deep fried goat’s cheese to go with it. As I walk back to the station, I notice one change on the building: the sign with a Union Jack denoting Hall Londres has been removed sometime over the past three years. Not like it has seen any use since the pre-pandemic times. I try to get a hot chocolate from the wending machine outside the waiting room, but its touch screen is not working. The one next to it sells me a bottle of water for €2.30.
Instead of a direct high-speed overnight train to London, I await the Travelski Night Express. I go to the platform at 21:55, as the train is scheduled to leave at 22:09. There’s a school group and perhaps another twenty or so people scattered around on the platform. At 22:05, the train rolls in, hauled by not one but two diesel locomotives. This is reassuring: a friend had told me that on the first Paris-bound service a few weeks ago, the company tried to run the train with just one locomotive to save on money, which resulted in passengers travelling without any heating. Instead, the two diesel locos, which travel around 650km on a fully electrified line, contribute to a heating climate. I’m told that leasing an electric locomotive was practically impossible as the company that has ones that are certified for France generally only lease them out to the state-owned SNCF, who in turn don’t offer any maintenance on them to competitors.
I had been suspicious of this train ever since Travelski, ostensibly a ski travel organiser, announced it in April 2025. The pitch was simple: overnight on the outbound Friday and the return Saturday, win an extra day-and-half of skiing. Sounds good, in theory. French travel pages proudly shared the news, followed by their British eco-friendly brethren. One such outlet, @flightfreeuk, whose mission I agree with, shared a picture of a random train in a scenic location, with European Sleeper’s route map (which runs from Brussels to Amsterdam to Berlin, nowhere near Travelski’s offering) alongside the remark that “getting to slopes flight-free will [would] be that much easier”. Aside from the fact that it was already easy during the daytime, I took issue with the idea that one would reshare this news without verifying that the operation was actually possible.
Behind the scenes, members of the European railway community were baffled: the numbers made little sense. 660 beds? A bar carriage?! Where would you get these? Are they certified for France? Would this be bookable by itself or only if one got their trip organised by Travelski? I had a hunch that this train would be cancelled due to a simple lack of available rolling stock. Others pointed out that the on-board operations would be run by Pegasus Trains, a travel operator which was founded in 2024 and has no experience in running night trains. Jon Worth’s bullshit meter seemed cautiously optimistic, which was a positive sign.
Some thought that SNCF would bring back some of their discarded carriages from the dead, but knowing the general attitude of the French railway company, this was highly unlikely. Another person suggested that it would be RDC Deutschland, but their fleet is completely booked up, or Treni Turistici Italiani’s coaches, or Regiojet’s couchettes. One post on LinkedIn mirrored the general attitude towards the service. Travelski’s website suggested that the rolling stock had been “used in the Netherlands, in Germany” and it would be renovated before being put in circulation. Simply put, we had no idea where the trains would come from.
Well, it came from Bourg-st-Maurice, the terminus of the mountain line. It consisted of no fewer than ten couchettes and a bar carriage. This was far from the easy, low-level boarding experience of the new generation NightJet which I have - unfortunately - grown accustomed to. The steps were high, and the doors opened clumsily. The atmosphere was ominous: the old, iron-y smell of a carriage built before the 1970s is unmistakable and quickly brought back childhood memories of taking Hungarian express trains.
The school group had been put in three or four compartments a few coaches down from mine. A completely full couchette-six is already a less-than-stellar experience, now adding teenagers who had done a full day of skiing, alongside their luggage, must have been something else. Myself and my friend were in our own compartment, an outcome I had definitely hoped for as sharing a six-bed compartment when it’s full is a struggle at the best of times and can be a straight nightmare at its worst.
To their credit, Travelski really tried. The attendant, wearing a Pegasus Train jacket, asked for our names and ticked us off. No questions around whether we would want breakfast, or when we would be woken up. Nightrest, the company once known as Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, which powers the Austrian nightjets, seemed to be a different world compared to this. We were given a little welcome pack, with ear plugs, an eye mask and a crossword, alongside bedding: an okay sheet, a pillow and a warm blanket. The compartments had heating, power sockets and USB-A power plugs. No Wi-Fi, of course. The carriages themselves had been repainted and had decals put on to advertise various ski locations, alongside the doors inside the carriages, which also had Travelski branding all over them.
We left Moutiers on time and made our way to the bar carriage, which was fun: operated by just one attendant, who was happy to sell dishes and beer, took card payments without question. The prices were reasonable, though I did not try any of the food, despite the temptation to have a tartiflette to put me to bed. There were plenty of people socialising.
The bathrooms were clean and adequately supplied, though again, far from the standards set by the new generation Nightjets. Were they spacious? Not particularly, but they were okay for what they had been intended for. There were no showers on the train - another feature I like on the Austrian sets. Once I laid down to rest, I noticed that the beds were sloped towards the wall, which was a welcome feature as our driver was keen on sharp braking during the night.
Onwards we went to Paris. I woke up a few times in the middle of the night, but six o’clock rolled around, when I heard two lound bangs on the compartment door. “Réveillez-vous, on arrivera à Paris en vingt minutes!” said the attendant. I did not have my brain ready to respond with but the timetable said I could have thirty more minutes of sleep - we were clearly running ahead of schedule, so I got ready and tried to enjoy the final ten minutes of rolling into Gare de Lyon. I did not sleep particularly well, but again, I may have just been spoiled by the comfort provided by Austrian nightjets.
Coming off the train, I was left ambivalent. These trains were only a year or two younger than my parents. Here’s a picture of one of them, in August 1968, in Essen:
And here it is in January 2026:
It is not that this train was inherently bad. From a purely function perspective, it did the job well. What annoyed me was that this train could be a mainstay in SNCF’s offering, or it could have been started way earlier. If there was political will for it, it could be running newer carriages. But in a way, the inability of Europe to provide a better alternative to these old, decrepit coaches is emblematic of the sad reality of the old continent.
I’ve been reading Dan Wang’s Breakneck and I find his contrast between China and the US very interesting. I can’t find the same lens to Europe: it’s hard to say if we, Europeans, can credibly say that we are built on a political economy of lawyers (like the US) or engineers (like China). There is no one profession to describe the political economy of Europe as there is not the same level of structural integration to it. Being a young adult here is characterised by having to deal with the contradictions that some of the things that were built in the Trente Glorieuses of 1945-1975 were really well done while new things are few and far between. Case in point - ski resorts! The state could, and did, promote winter sports. It did so to an expanding middle class, and extended what was, until then, the sport of the economic elites, through direct policy and spending. High-speed rail, too, was literally a race between France and Germany on who could build more and make it available to their people. But that momentum dissipated state spending thanks to whichever flavour of populism one subscribes to. We are all producing and selling services now, and infrastructure is left rotting. States now, for better or for worse, are social insurance companies with standing armies. There is some sad irony in the fact that I can pay with an American Express credit card for my drinks on a night train whose carriages were manufactured in 1968, or that I can order food from Istanbul Kebab using a touch screen.
The Travelski Night Express is another symptom of Europe’s “stalling” night train revival. The Austrians keep pushing on but even they have had to shift to a pricing model that somewhat allows them to recoup costs. The emblematic, quasi-Orient Express Paris-Vienna night train was cancelled after the French state cut the subsidies that financed it for three years after being so reluctant to run it that buying tickets for it through the French train operator was in itself a difficult task. Moreover, from what I have heard, running it was already like pulling teeth, to the point where SNCF did not even show up to the meetings after the cancellation to discuss how it could be resumed. In Switzerland, lawmakers did not want to pick up the cost of running a night train to Sweden, and the Swedish rail operator is haemmorhaging money on its overnight train to Berlin.
On the private side, Midnight Trains, which was meant to revive night trains in and around France, is dead, though European Sleeper is surviving well. They also keep e-mailing me to become a shareholder while so make of their financial health what you will. Rumours that they may run to countries in the south of Europe may inevitably run into track access charge difficulties, though I wish them the best of luck. I am very curious to see what will come of Nox Mobility, whose founders are promising a modern night train experience.
Night trains are not just a cool idea. They are a sustainable form of long-distance transportation, and the new generation Austrian nightjet is emblematic of they can be made well: travelling on these at least comes close to what one would expect in 2026. I hear good things about night trains in Scandinavia too. It is just a shame that elsewhere, there is not a single, comprehensive, EU-driven initiative to show that they can be done well consistently everywhere.
Conflict of interest declaration: I am not affiliated with Travelski, and I paid for my ticket out of my own pocket.