Ask Michael Guerra about night trains running through the Channel Tunnel and he can’t help but throw his hands up in frustration — it happens dozens of times on our Zoom call. And no wonder: the engineer and founder of London Sleepers has been trying to get an overnight service running between London’s St Pancras and the continent for 18 years. ”It’s really hard to do,” he says, adding that the financials of the business are ”really stupid”.
While Guerra’s efforts remain stymied, the idea is getting a lot of renewed interest. A report from High-Speed Rail Group — an industry group made up of rail operators and manufacturers, including HS1 which runs the rail network between London and the Channel Tunnel — made headlines by calling for sleeper trains to be allowed to run through the tunnel to help reduce the carbon emissions of vacation travel. ”There’s the potential for night trains to tackle the biggest single carbon purchase of the year, a holiday abroad,” says Ralph Smyth, the author of the report.
Mark Smith, of train-trip planning site The Man in Seat 61, says such a route could link London to Barcelona or Milan (Spain and Italy are both popular destinations for British travellers), while routes to Switzerland or Germany could open up the rest of Europe. ”There is a ready market for these trains and I don’t think they would have a problem filling them,” Smith says.
In the past two years night trains have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, helped by the increasing discomfort of budget air travel and the security that goes with it, concerns around the climate emergency, and now the pandemic. Austrian operator ÖBB led the way after purchasing Deutsche Bahn’s night trains. Overnight passenger numbers doubled between 2016 and 2018 and the fleet is set to grow from 160 vehicles to 231 by 2022. Sweden is extending its sleeper routes to Brussels and Hamburg, Czech RegioJet restarted its summer night train, and France is discussing reviving its recently shuttered services.
But London has been left out. While the UK does have internal sleeper services from the capital to Scotland and Cornwall, there are no overnight connections to Europe — though there used to be. From 1936 until 1980, there was a sleeper train between London Victoria and Paris Gare du Nord. As the Channel Tunnel was not yet built, the watery bits were traversed via ferry from Dover to Dunkirk, the train carriages loaded onto a boat. (If this appeals, you can still take a train to Harwich and switch to an overnight Stena ferry to Hook of Holland, but you’ll have to walk onto the ferry yourself.)
Once the Channel Tunnel arrived, that Night Ferry service ended, but a replacement was planned. Dubbed the Nightstar, this overnight service would have whisked travellers through the tunnel from London to Amsterdam and Frankfurt, as well as carrying passengers from Plymouth, Swansea and Glasgow to Paris and Brussels. But it was deemed unlikely to make a profit amid competition from airlines, and the carriages already built were sold to Canada at a significant discount, where they’re still in use today.
In short, London had better overnight train links before the tunnel existed — which, ironically, is part of the problem. The Channel Tunnel Safety Authority’s regulations mean bespoke, specialised trains must be used, rather than existing rolling stock. For example, ÖBB couldn’t just run its trains through the tunnel, it would have to order new ones.
Among other requirements, the train must be drivable from each end, have a minimum length of 375m, and feature fire suppression systems that will halt the spread of flame for the length of time a train is in a tunnel. ”The basic premise is you have to have a train that can run on fire for 30 minutes,” Guerra explains. ”There is a bit more to it than that, but needless to say these trains are a bit more expensive.”
And it’s not the only problem. Another hurdle is security. The Eurostar stops in very few places for a reason: each location needs to have border checks and airport-style security. Any train running through the Channel Tunnel must be ”sterile”, which means devoid of unauthorised people or material, Guerra explains. ”Indeed, all the food that is placed on board the Channel Tunnel trains need to come via airline-type secure supply in sealed containers after being checked,” he says. ”The depots where trains are maintained are also secure-access only.”
It’s especially difficult for a night train with many stops, as not every station is capable or willing to dedicate a secure platform for one service. Guerra says the French authorities are especially concerned that the tunnel is a terrorist target, making it difficult to try new methods. ”A lot of the work we’ve been doing is chiseling away at what they actually want in terms of security confidence so that we can focus on deploying something,” he says. For example, that could be a just-in time screening setup that is pulled out for the train’s arrival and disappears after it departs, giving the station back its space.
These regulatory, safety and security challenges are not insurmountable, but they do add to cost. Bespoke trains are more expensive and harder to sell on if a scheme collapses, new security techniques are costly to develop and get approved, and back-and-forth discussions involving top-level politicians aren’t trivial to set up.
And that’s before the business case itself is considered. Running a night train is expensive: passengers want creature comforts like showers that require heavy water to be hauled along the route, beds and private rooms take up more room than seats, meaning fewer fares can be sold, and those specialised trains need to be procured.
But carriages aside, the biggest financial concern is access charges, the fees that operators pay to run their trains over rail. As night trains by design travel large distances, those fees are huge — and that’s before considering the fact that the stretch between London and the end of the Channel Tunnel is the most expensive length of track in the world, says Guerra. According to his own calculations, the track access charge for that 159km costs €17,244 (£15,500), more than half of the €30,850 access charge for the entire 1,614km journey between London and Barcelona.
Plus, as everyone in the rail industry is keen to point out, night trains compete with aviation, and that industry has no duty on fuel, though airlines do pay a passenger duty. That’s one reason why a flight from London to Barcelona in September could cost as little as £32 — though that doesn’t include the fare to Luton or baggage charges — while a train on the same dates would cost £280, take much longer, and require booking multiple tickets. That makes shifting away from carbon-intensive flights a challenge, says Smyth. ”We need to get the price of flights up and the cost of rail down,” he says, adding that may involve taxes and subsidies.
Despite these hurdles, what’s holding back a night train through the tunnel isn’t regulation or safety or costs, but political will. All of this could be overcome if the government decided to back a project, be it London Sleepers or an existing operator. Jordan Gross, Guerra’s business partner, says that if the government offered them a guarantee of last resort, which removes risk for lenders, he could get the first round of funding easily, enabling the company to borrow the rest. But that hasn’t happened.
In response to Smyth’s report, the Department for Transport said it is “ready to work with any potential operators who have a commercially viable proposition”.
But Guerra has had little luck with the government. He’s built a contact list of a hundred civil servants ”whose entire occupation is to stop you from doing this”, he claims. ”They do not like change, they are very inertial.” In short, it’s easier to not run night trains through the Channel Tunnel than it is to do the hard work to allow them — especially without any political leadership.
Without the government stepping in, Britain will likely be left out of the web of night train routes criss-crossing the continent. But we can still use the Eurostar to tap into that network, connecting at Brussels for Vienna or Paris for Venice. A potential merger between Eurostar and the French operator Thalys could mean trains running to Bordeaux and eventually Germany. ”You could coordinate the timetable and booking arrangements so it could be booked seamlessly as one transaction,” says Smith.
That’s what Guerra’s London Sleepers is now aiming to operate: a night-train service from Amsterdam to Barcelona, which British travellers could access via the Eurostar at Brussels. And those continental plans likely hold true even if the government suddenly got on board, says business partner Gross. He claims that investing in the UK on complicated projects is simply too big of an ask right now. ”I couldn’t, personally speaking, go out and pitch investors on the basis of running a novel service from London to the rest of Europe because I think we’d go bust because of the government’s ineptitude,” Gross says. ”That’s not a risk I'm willing to run.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
