Our new ticketing site is now live! Using either this or the original site (both powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
Well and, indeed, ÖBB have scaled back their Nightjet expansion plans fairly considerably (in favour of Railjet expansion). They cut back their order for NJ2s from 33 down to 24 trainsets, and looking at their expansion plans from 2021, by my count only one of those routes are now running.
Apart from the fact that Switzerland decided, hard-nosed as they can be, that they won't subsidize new night trains (meaning Zurich - Rome and Barcelona were dead), ÖBB have realized that there is much more growth potential in long-distance (and very-long-distance) day trains than in night trains. I also suspect they found out that those new, hugely expensive NJ sets are hard to pay for (indeed I consider that stock order - and honestly not only in hindsight - a big mistake, it really endangered the NJ business model and brought us the very unfortunate RJ2 sets).
The European Sleeper to Milan seems to have arrived with a delay of about 250 minutes. The return working is going out about 120 minutes late.
Meanwhile, the other services paint a much brighter picture, with last night's Prague to Brussels departure reportedly arriving 5hr late, after starting short in Berlin. The Paris to Berlin train was *just* an hour late though.
This is quite reliable, and I simply cannot understand why anyone would be so negative if they experienced it. I would be even more confused if they were negative after paying €400-€700 for a single cabin.
Not sure. Seems unlikely as it is not an end vehicle, but Prague-Brussels was also missing a sleeper. They are just old and knackered I think, which is a shame as it is real classic stock.
So here is what happened on last night's Brussels to Milan train. The first I heard about any delay was the post on this thread about the shunting incident. No email or message from ES. It wasn't until about an hour before departure time, when the destination boards in Brussels Midi showed the train with a 90 minutes delay that I knew the train was actually running and how much the delay was. People were gathered on the platform but the platform display boards didn't actually show anything for quite a while so some people were looking a little anxious. It did eventually appear on the boards but was then revised to an extra hour delay at the last minute. Around this time everyone seemed to get a text message from European sleeper saying that the train was definitely running.
The train did then appear and everything was fine with boarding. I was in six berth compartment set up for four people and everything was basically fine. All quite basic but that's what I expected and the other occupants seemed happy as well. These carriages had some retro fitted USB sockets which are quite handy. The toilets were all clean and working and no problems there. I went to have a look at the carriages set up as what they call comfort class with the extra mattresses. These are slightly newer looking carriages and looked quite nice to me. Some additional passengers joined in Verviers, Aachen and Cologne.
On the first stretch, after leaving Brussels, there seemed to be a few quite abrupt stops and I was wondering if this meant we were going to have some kind of problem the whole way but it seemed to be okay in the end.
We went on quite an extensive night tour of the freight yards of Cologne which I quite enjoyed.
Between Cologne and Basel it felt to me like we had quite a lot of extended stops although it's hard to be objective about how long we were at a standstill as I was only half awake for bits of that time. In my experience these kinds of stops are normal on night trains, but I suppose I wondered if there might have been some effort to try and regain some of our delay. In Basel an announcement was made that we were still running late, but it seemed we hadn't lost much time in Germany. I think we did sit at Basel for quite a while though (again I was not fully conscious).
The trip through Switzerland seemed to go quite smoothly but somehow by their time we got to the Italian border the delay had grown from two and a half hours to about four hours. There was rather a lengthy stop in Chiasso while the locomotive was swapped. For some reason they put new locos on the front and back, perhaps to speed up turn around times in Milan. I am not sure exactly why this process took so long and the carriage staff didn't seem to know either. You would hope that this operation will get more efficient over time. As far as I could see, a different company takes over the operational part of the service for the portion within Italy and it looked quite obvious that this was the first time they were doing this with passengers on board.
Once we eventually left chiazzo it was fairly straightforward run to Milan with a little bit of hiccup in Como (where a cleaning team got on board) and we arrived in Milan around four hours late. In fact we arrived around the time the return service was supposed to be leaving and there was already a platform of customers waiting. I'm not sure if the usual plan is for the train to go to a depot and then return to the station but on this occasion it just stayed in the platform and set off back to Brussels around two hours late.
For me the delay wasn't really a big deal but of course I was on board as an enthusiast not just a regular passenger and I'm sure it will have been more frustrating for some of the other passengers. Actually the atmosphere at least on my carriage was quite good and most people seemed to be fairly tolerant because they knew it was the first run.
That said though, European sleeper really don't help themselves by their lack of communication. There were very few announcements to keep people informed and their certainly weren't any particularly apologetic announcements. Likewise, if it was possible for them to send everyone a text in Brussels once the train was already 90 minutes late why was it not possible to send one earlier, before the scheduled departure time, telling people that there was going to be a delay and then updating every half hour for reassurance?
It feels like that stuff doesn't need to cost anything, in exchange for gathering a greater amount of good will amongst passengers. But maybe the operation is run on such a skeleton crew that they just don't have time especially when several incidents are ongoing simultaneously?
Anyway, I enjoyed my trip and would / will use them again.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
The trip through Switzerland seemed to go quite smoothly but somehow by their time we got to the Italian border the delay had grown from two and a half hours to about four hours. There was rather a lengthy stop in Chiasso while the locomotive was swapped. For some reason they put new locos on the front and back, perhaps to speed up turn around times in Milan. I am not sure exactly why this process took so long and the carriage staff didn't seem to know either. You would hope that this operation will get more efficient over time. As far as I could see, a different company takes over the operational part of the service for the portion within Italy and it looked quite obvious that this was the first time they were doing this with passengers on board.
Operator in Italy is Arenaways (TCS on the rest of the route AFAIK), and the TCS 193 loco is probably not homologated (yet?) for Italy. It looks like ES now indeed managed to make a real agreement with Arenaways, after they failed to do that for their test runs to Venice.
They are required to have two locos for turning around in Milan. I doubt the ex-DB Cargo 193 is meant to go to Milan, as there would be nothing for it to partner with. Also Arenaways are using their own locos for this.
We are aware of an issue with emails from the Forum to Microsoft-based email accounts (hotmail/outlook/live.com email addresses). This is being looked into currently, thanks for your patience meanwhile.
