Night Trains

The origin

ÖBB brought back the Berlin–Paris sleeper in late 2023 — eight years after Deutsche Bahn had scrapped it. That one fact hides a longer arc: a 1990s peak, a slow dismantling by budget airlines, then a hesitant comeback. I wanted people to feel that arc rather than read it off a chart, so the whole story unfolds on a single map of Europe. You scroll; routes light up amber, fade to crimson as they close, and flicker back as the network recovers. Five short chapters, about six minutes, one continent.

The pull

The map does the talking. As you scroll, it carries you from 1995 at its peak, through the long decline as cheap flights took over and Austria quietly buying up the abandoned sleeper fleet in 2016, to the climate-era comeback — and the network on screen reshapes itself to match. The one rule I set myself was that every route and date had to be real, so before drawing a single line I re-checked every route against operator archives and the rail press, corrected the errors in the source data, and published the full source list so anyone can trace a line back to where it came from.

What came out

39 verified routes · 5 chapters · every source published