Night trains are soaring in popularity in France, according to new figures from Réseau Action Climat showing that over a million passengers chose to travel by French sleeper trains in 2024 – a huge increase in the last year alone. But growth in the sector is likely to stagnate unless rolling stock availability improves, the report warns.
Passenger numbers on night trains rose by 26% year-on-year between 2023 and 2024, and sleeper services carried more than twice as many passengers as five years ago, the Federation of environmental, transport and energy groups found.
The record passenger numbers mean that night trains had a 76% occupancy rate on average, while Paris-Toulouse and Paris-Nice routes were over 80% full. Indeed, the line between the City of Lights and the Ville Rose saw extraordinary growth of 64% in the five years from 2019 to 2024.
What’s more, passengers favouring the night train whether their journeys are for leisure or business. Business travellers composed 30% of all passengers in 2023, the Réseau notes. And even delays and a three-month timetable interruption on France’s only two international lines (Paris-Vienna and Paris-Berlin), could not deter passengers.
The surge in use offers evidence, the Réseau says, that night trains have won over the public thanks to the simple, practical answer they provide when it comes to both transnational and regional journey planning.
But the sector is likely to be stymied by supply chain issues, the report warns, noting that a “lack of sleeping cars is preventing the creation of new national and international connections that could meet the high demand from passengers.”
French rail operator SNCF operates just 129 sleeper cars at present, too few to meet demand on the most popular routes. The French government called for contract bids in January 2025 to increase the fleet to 309 cars by 2030 – but the Réseau claims this is insufficient and should be boosted by another 31 carriages at least, with a view to creating annual capacity for 5.7 million passengers in 600 sleeper cars by 2035.
It also recommends redesigning the night train network to take it from a hub-and-spoke model, with all routes going in and out of Paris, to a true network which would see the country’s other major cities such as Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, and Nice gain their own interconnections. This strategy would save 800,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, the Réseau says, as a first step towards 1,200 cars by 2040, with capacity for 12 million passengers and a potential saving of 2 million tons of CO2 equivalent.
Increasing the number of international sleeper services, for example from Paris to Spanish, Italian, and UK cities, is also crucial to efforts to reduce aviation emissions, the group points out.
