Show HN: Luna Rail – Treating night trains as a spatial optimization problem

Sleeper trains are held back by flying getting subsidised heavily by not having kerosene taxed, and national governments giving airports effectively unlimited room to grow; happily externalising the environmental cost. Why take a train if you can fly for a fraction of the cost?

Trains in general are held back by governments not investing in rail infrastructure, because the pork barrel of another motorway link is so hard to resist (and we're not properly maintaining these either).

Sleeper trains are held back, because cross-boundary collaboration between the various semi-national rail companies is tough (for Europe).

Sleeper trains are held back, because there is a lack of modern rolling stock. Not completely new concepts; just up-to-date sleeper wagons (the ÖBB has the leading edge here now with their new wagons).

There is room for improvement in the wagon designs, but it is almost irrelevant in the face of the other challenges.

You start off by essentially claiming the unit economics of night trains being too poor compared to aviation is the largest hurdle, then finish off by claiming that unit economics are not that major issue.

Our perspective is that with much improved unit economics, the problem overall becomes much more easily solvable. You can compete with aviation on price. You can pay for prioritized track access. You can operate trains privately without direct involvement of national operators.

Finally, the refurb approach skirts the rolling stock bottle neck.

I've listed four major causes. These are cumulative, not mutually exclusive.

You can't compete with aviation on price currently. Not while its environmental costs are graciously overlooked and left out of the ticket price. This is a political problem.

Comfort, reliability, sustainability, elegance, ease-of-use: those are the major selling points for night rail travel done right. This includes legroom, luggage space, and the ability to move around outside of your seat and to toss and turn in bed¹ — something current generation sleeper trains provide. If your goal is to cram as many people as possible in every metre of train length, you are optimising the wrong parameter at the wrong time.

1: The coffin beds in these hotel pods are clever from a space filling perspective, but I fear I would be nastily banging my knees several times in the course of the night, and that's ignoring the fact that sleeping that low close to the rails is just not pleasant.

You missed a couple other points against night trains.

first trains work best if they stop many times - how will you wake people up at 3am for their stop? For that matter who would agree to that? Without that churn many destinations are not in range.

second, track needs maintenance. If the track is running at night as well when will you repair it? I makes sense to just close nost track every night for repairs. For busy two rail sections you can close on track and run very reduced service on the other - but this reduction means you don't want people sleeping as you can fill your trains just on people working night shifts.

all of the above are challenges. They can be worked around in various ways however they to be considered to see if it is worth it-

No they don't. You use the same hub to hub model as airlines. E.g London to Edinburgh, not London to Edinburgh stopping in 4 places.

One of the nice things about traveling at night is you have less time pressure and congestion so when doing track repairs it's usually fine to divert the train.

Yup. These two points are not an issue at all, and are in fact strengths for sleeper trains. Being able to redirect a sleeper train without any (or minimal) impact on its timetable is a big plus.

Usually they depart from the last boarding station around midnight, and the first disembarking station won't be hit until six in the morning. Some outliers exist, but the number of people getting on or off there is negligible. For most travellers you are in the train before 22:00, and won't leave before 6:00.

This ÖBB line is typical: https://www.nightjet.com/de/reiseziele/oesterreich/wien

Yes, you can get off in Nürnberg at 4:08. But almost no one does that. The train just happens to have a halt there¹, but 95% of the passengers get on in the Netherlands and the Ruhr Area, and won't get off until Austria (and vice versa).

1: I suspect mostly for rail topological reasons.

>Sleeper trains are held back by flying getting subsidised heavily by not having kerosene taxed

Is whatever fuel trains use taxed? If not, I don't see how this is relevant.

>and national governments giving airports effectively unlimited room to grow

Which countries are those? For instance in UK they wanted to expand Heathrow since as early as 2006, yet due to various government shenanigans isn't due to complete until 2040, assuming it doesn't get backtracked again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport

Moreover since you're comparing against trains, don't trains need land as well, for the tracks and stations? Why do trains seemingly get a free pass from you on that?

>Trains in general are held back by governments not investing in rail infrastructure, because the pork barrel of another motorway link is so hard to resist (and we're not properly maintaining these either).

What makes motorways more of a "pork barrel" than train tracks?

Hub to hub - does that mean you wake everyone at 3am to change trains? Nobody switches cars with humans in them.

> Nobody switches cars with humans in them.

What do you mean? Changing the train consist during the trip? That is exactly what they can do.

Hamburg/Amsterdam on one end, Innsbruck/Wien on the other. Those wagons get shuffled about like a deck of cards en route! So in Amsterdam there is one train with wagons marked Wien and wagons marked Innsbruck. You get in the right numbered wagon, and end up where you want. In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere (actually, probably München) they turn two trains into two different trains.

Most people never notice.

I took sleeper trains in France when I was younger, it was quite modern (2000-ish trains), but not a good experience honestly. You have to share a tiny room with 3 other strangers, you are stressed about a possible aggression and/or theft and/or bed bugs, everything is impractical, your neighbor may snore, you can't really take a shower... and I can imagine that a woman can feel very unsafe there, too.

I can see the appeal for young people who want to stay in hostels to save money, but honestly I prefer to drive or take a plane. Money here is not the problem.

Where I live it's a pretty common feature of train timetables - certain trains will split partway through a journey, and no-one gets off in the process (well, unless part of the train is terminating at the stop)

Every train I've been on that switched cars did so with everyone still in them.

Well you need sleeper trains only for long distances usually. Quite often you can buy more expensive cabin with 1-2 sleeping seats (eg if travelling with a friend/partner). All of Russia is travelling in country via a sleeper train because of distances, slower trains, and sometimes more expensive/less optimal flights (eg a lot of flights are routed via Moscow). So it’s very normalised; I traveled this way since childhood, even going to Ukraine for holidays before the aggression started, and it was pretty fine experience, a bit rough in 90s/00s, but better now.