Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 15th of February, which means, well, I'm counting down the days until the 20th February when I'll be able to book my trip on the new sleeper service, overnight train that will be able to book my trip on the new sleeper service overnight train that will be

going from Brussels via Amsterdam to Berlin. The services don't start till the 25th of May,

but it is very exciting that a new train is coming in.

This is run by an organisation based in Utrecht in the Netherlands, beautiful place if

you've not been there by the way, and it is effectively a new company wanting to do new things

and wanting to celebrate the overnight train, as I do, but I'm not absolutely

sure that the overnight train is something which is an absolute certainty for success.

I hate to be negative and I'll certainly be booking my train and looking

forward very much indeed to the experience. Maybe just connecting at Brussels from Eurostar and then

boarding a train drifting through the night. What a wonderful experience it is, as I'm sure you know,

if you've been lucky enough to travel a European sleeper train anywhere. Of course, in the UK,

they're pretty limited. You've got the Knight Riviera between London Paddington and Penzance.

And that is a good train for the reason that actually, although it's an absolutely beautiful run,

particularly from Penzance as far as Exeter, it's also very time consuming.

And so that's when the benefit of a sleeper train really kicks in.

You go to sleep at midnight as you leave Paddington,

wake up at 7 o'clock in the morning in Pennsance and that is a really good time saving. Same thing,

of course, between Scotland and London, particularly if you're going from one of the more far away locations like Fort William in particular

because of course there's no planes in and out of Fort William and so therefore the train taking roughly 11 hours is a good way to do it

not least because if it's either heading south in the middle of summer, you've got spectacular

views or indeed going north, you wake up and suddenly you're in the wilds of the highlands.

But it's an expensive business. All the sleeper trains, as far as I'm aware, in the UK, lose money.

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