French bureaucracy is to blame for delaying the launch of the European Sleeper night train from Amsterdam to Barcelona, the train company’s co-founder, Chris Engelsman, has said. Initial hopes were that the new European Sleeper route between the Dutch and Catalonian capitals would be inaugurated in 2025, but 2026 is now looking more probable, the firm’s executives say.
“Very conservative” planning methods
Engelsman told Dutch train news outlet Treinreiziger that negotiations with France about using its network are proving challenging and it is French rail network operator SNCF’s attitude to advanced planning that is the problem. The network has what Engelsman called a “very conservative” approach to timetabling engineering works, often putting events into the calendar that are not yet confirmed, which means scheduling a night train is difficult.
“They plan a lot of work in advance that does not always happen,” Engelsman said. “They do not even have that many contractors. They are playing it very safe, and that does not make a night train possible.”
“Incompetence”
However, European Sleeper is taking some comfort from “other parties”, such as Midnight Trains, who have also complained about hold ups caused by SNCF and who say the French network is “difficult to do business with”. In words that may not endear him to French stakeholders, the European Sleeper co-founder went on to characterise their approach as “partly understandable and partly incompetence.”
SNCF in turn might well point out that another significant barrier to the launch date of the Amsterdam – Barcelona route is a lack of rolling stock, which is the responsibility of the train firm to take care of. Engelsman has already admitted that European Sleeper “need 30 to 35 good carriages. We are working on that now, but they will probably also have to be renovated.”
High level assistance
Meanwhile help has been on hand from the European Commission which selected the Dutch-Spanish night train project in 2023 as one of ten passenger transport pilots that would benefit from political and administrative back up, to promote greener and more efficient mobility in the bloc in line with the body’s Strategy for Sustainable and Smart Mobility. With that high level assistance in addressing barriers to progress, Engelsman said, “It is now only a matter of time” and that the situation is “improving step by step”.
European Sleeper has previously said it aims to open at least one new route a year and debuted a Brussels to Prague route in March 2024.
