For those who live anywhere but London, taking the Eurostar usually means adding the eye-watering costs and frequent unreliability of British train travel to the journey. Unsurprisingly, most opt for flying instead.
Yet it was only a few decades ago that the UK came tantalisingly close to a different reality. In the late 1990s, the newly minted operator of Eurostar was planning sleeper train connections which would take passengers from Glasgow, London, Manchester, Plymouth and Swansea to Amsterdam, Paris and Frankfurt on overnight services.
A fleet of sleeper cars decked out with showers, beds and catering services was built and even tested on railway tracks.
Then came the privatisation of British Rail, the introduction of track access charges in Europe and growing competition from low-cost airlines. By 1999, the project was deemed commercially unviable. The plans were abandoned, the carriages sold off and the idea consigned to history.
The ill-fated story of this UK-Europe sleeper service is far from unique. Between the late 1990s and through the 2010s, sleeper services across Europe shrank dramatically as airline giants lured in
