As far as I can see, the sleeper is never going to offer the comfort of a hotel, even a budget one, because it can't. A hotel doesn't move about and doesn't jolt in the early hours of the morning to join onto two more hotels, a hotel bed is far more spacious, the catering is much better, the room is much more spacious, and the corridors are wide enough for me to walk along with a full backpack on without the tent getting wedged between the walls. The sleeper is limited in what it can offer because it is a train, with very limited space, there is only a finite amount of stuff you can fit on it, a hotel by comparison has a much larger footprint, much more room for the luxuries as well as the essentials.
I used the sleeper to get home from Inverness last Friday evening. It worked from a functional perspectiver, it meant I slept during the longest leg of the journey, whereas a daytime train could get boring once past the beautiful scenery. I would hardly call it a premier experience, as far as I was concerned it is a way of avoiding flying (for environmental reasons), and is cheaper than a daytime train. From a purely logical and selfish perspective, the optimal way to get home would have been an afternoon flight on Friday, then I would have got to Horsham in time for an evening bridge session.
