Julian Glover: This crisis in travel is a chance to reset — start with more sleeper trains

Summer should be a time for travel, but this year, trapped by quarantine and trepidation, many of us are staying at home.

The latest extension of quarantine rules, for those returning from France, the Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, Turks and Caicos, and Aruba, has led to even more people cancelling their plans. Still, they haven’t brought in rules against dreaming yet, so let me take you on an imaginary holiday journey which was once possible, and should be again.

We’ll start in an unglamorous time and place: Victoria station, on the night of October 31, 1980. The economy was in recession. The Police were at the top of the charts (with Don’t Stand So Close To Me). And with no fanfare and not many passengers, an extraordinary train pulled out of London for the last time.

British Rail was scrapping the Night Ferry, a service that used once-glamorous art deco carriages to carry passengers in comfortable beds direct to Paris and Brussels. The carriages were specially adapted so they could be shunted on to a ferry for the crossing over the Channel.

When it began running in 1936 it was the height of style, picked by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as their connection to and from exile in France. When Winston Churchill used it just after the war it made a special stop to pick him up from near his country home, Chartwell. But air travel killed it off in the Eighties and that seemed to be the end of sleeper trains from Britain to the rest of Europe.

When the Channel Tunnel was dug, there was, briefly, a plan to run overnight services from unlikely destinations such as Plymouth and Swansea to Paris, and the Government spent a lot of money on building new carriages before, characteristically, changing its mind and selling them off to Canada, where they now rattle across the ­Rockies.

That’s why, today, if you want to get a train to the continent you have to start on Eurostar. It’s fine if you are only going to France or Belgium — remember, we’re imagining this journey, so you don’t need to worry about quarantine. You can make it to Germany pretty fast if you change trains. There’s a service now to Amsterdam and until this year there was a summer special down to the south of France, too.

But if you want to go any further — Italy, say, or Scandinavia — you’ve got to really love trains to try it, however much wonderful websites such as seat61.com and europebyrail.eu try to encourage the adventure.

I used to make the journey to Spain by rail all the time when you could change in Paris for a sleek hotel train overnight, but that was cruelly killed off a few years back. Now, even with high-speed lines, you have to waste hours on a day train and add in at least one overnight hotel to reach somewhere like Andalucía. Even Madrid takes 23 hours. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to fly.

Maybe sleeper trains are a luxury, but they are also romantic, lovely and ­useful. I’ve used them all over the world: Bulawayo to Victoria Falls in wooden carriages; Penang to Bangkok; Alice Springs to Adelaide, with onboard slot machines; and Moscow to Nice, a two-night trip on a slick new Russian train, deserted except for a man who seemed to follow us whenever we went to the restaurant car for vodka and whom we decided had to be a spy.

In Britain, the service from London to the Highlands, recently upgraded, is magical. The overnight route to Cornwall is magnificent, too, although bizarrely, this month, at just the moment the South-West is packed with tourists, the nightly sleeper train is only open to people prepared to sit in uncomfortable seats, with the beds shuttling back and forth each day, but locked, out of use.

Across the Channel, Austria’s enterprising railway company is opening new sleeper routes — running now, despite coronavirus. That means you can leave London in the late afternoon, change in Brussels and doze your way to Innsbruck or Vienna, arriving the next morning with breakfast in bed.

But there is still one thing you can’t do and that’s climb into a sleeper train in London and travel though the night to somewhere like Venice or Stockholm.

With air travel in crisis, and frowned upon because of climate change, there is an opportunity here. Coronavirus might encourage the return of the sleeper, too: what better way to social distance on a journey than in your private cabin, with its own tiny shower? No need for mask-wearing airport security check in hell: just a gentle gin and tonic before bed.

Is this always going to be just a dream? Is there a chance for a modern-day successor to the Night Ferry train? I think there is — a case made recently in a report from the High Speed Rail Group. Most of the time, this is a body that lobbies for things like HS2 — the sort of clinical, fast services which have killed off many of Europe’s rambling and romantic sleeper routes.

But as the report points out, there is no reason why the Channel Tunnel can’t carry sleeper services, and if they ran on high-speed tracks they could cover serious distances overnight.

Building new trains would be un­affordable, but with Eurostar’s daytime traffic in freefall there’s surely an opportunity to adapt some of its under-used current trains to carry us in comfortable beds through the night.

Maybe there won’t be brass handles and fine wooden panelling of the kind I enjoyed a couple of years back when I climbed into my bunk on the luxurious ­Venice-Simplon Orient Express. But a chance to sleep, to dream and to arrive would be wonderful.