Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. I'd love to say that I'm on the Orient Express. I'm not, unfortunately, but I am on what is the closest relation to that great transcontinental railway train, which ran, well, pretty much up till about 15 years ago.

You can't any longer take the Orient Express west from where I boarded, which was Vienna.

The closest equivalent is the 8.10 p from Platform 7 at Vienna Haltbahnhof,

the main station. This is the train which is actually speeding through the night.

Part of it is going to Amsterdam, the other part to Hamburg, where it will arrive pretty much in the middle of the morning.

Tomorrow it's a long old way, but the train is pretty packed.

We've picked up a couple of people at a couple of stations once we get into Germany it will get

a lot busier I think and the idea is that even though low-cost aviation has kind of taken over

from an awful lot of normal night trains,

Austrian railways,

Eustere Bukh Bundesbahn,

O.B, as you can see, the slogans

plastered liberally around this carriage,

will tell you, is very much of the mind

that this is the future that people will happily travel

overnight. I'm in a seating area. It's quite densely packed. The idea is that you get a seat,

you get a bit of a recline. If you've got a table, which is very nice

than I have, because I'm talking to you on a microphone on it, that's great. But the trouble is

the recline sends your legs quite a long way forward and they would undoubtedly be colliding with those of the person opposite

you. The rolling stock is actually first rate. It looks brand new unlike many of the sleeper trains

which are rattling around well the UK as well as parts of continental Europe. I've not actually been on the new

Caledonian sleeper because it's simply too expensive, but the Knight Riviera, which links

...