NO ONE WILL MISS PLANES:

But why take a night train at all? Why not fly, drive, or apply to your nearest genie for a magic-carpet ride, preferably with a seat on the aisle? The best reason was supplied by my godfather, who was a military attaché in Moscow during the nineteen-eighties. If he wished to go to Leningrad by train, tickets would be issued to him only for travel at night. Daylight, which might have afforded a view of sensitive installations, was off limits.

Lesser mortals, with duller jobs, have three reasons to choose a sleeper train. The first of these is logistical. Say you work at the Stock Exchange in Milan. You have a meeting booked for Tuesday, September 8th, this year, in central Paris, at noon. (Because you are an optimist and a tough guy, and because you are currently hiding in your apartment, subsisting on macaroni from your pantry, and no longer able to take your shirts across town to be laundered by your ninety-year-old mother, you expect to remain virus-free.) You have a choice: air or rail? Air means an early start, with a taxi to Milan's Linate Airport, and the 08:25 Alitalia flight on Tuesday morning. Eighty-five dollars in coach, but, hey, someone else is paying, and the idea of being divided from the proletariat by a nylon curtain still gives you a weird kick, so a business seat it is. Three hundred and fifty bucks.

To go by rail, by contrast, involves dining at home, then catching the ten-past-eleven on Monday night, from Milan's central station. Again, your own space, with a sleeping compartment to yourself, will be expensive, at two hundred and seventy dollars. If you don't mind sharing with another man, however, the price plummets to ninety-three dollars. A steal. Unfortunately, you do mind, since that other man, in your shuddering imagination, is sure to be a catarrhal insomniac with complex gastric issues and featherlight fingers. A stealer.

So, in terms of cost, the plane and the train match up. The same goes for arrival times: 09:50 at Orly Airport, or thirteen minutes earlier at the Gare de Lyon, not far from the Place de la Bastille. And there's the rub. Most night trains insert you into the core of a city, whereas planes deposit you, at best, on the outer rind. A cab into Paris from Orly (or, more irritating still, from Charles de Gaulle Airport), at rush hour, is the antithesis of fun, and you may not fancy the schlep by public transport. Alight from the night train, though, and you will find le Tout-Paris, ready to greet you. Being in no hurry, you amble along the platform to breakfast in a restaurant so royally gilded, on the walls and ceilings, that the yolk of your poached egg will shine like the sun.

The second reason to travel by night train is flygskam. The word means "flight shame" in Swedish, and denotes the guilt that gnaws--or should rightfully gnaw--at your vitals when you realize that, by nipping from Berlin to Ibiza on EasyJet, say, for a skull-jolting weekend on the dance floor, you will, however indirectly, hasten the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. If you can spread the shame, forcing celebrities to charter their own yachts in a fit of conscience, so much the better. The vice of flying, thus exposed, has spawned a reciprocal virtue: tågskryt, or "train brag," as practiced by those who not only swap the skies for the railroad but, having made the sacrifice, go on Instagram and tell their friends about it.

The science is solid. If our Milanese broker flies to Paris (a distance of around four hundred miles), he will--not personally, of course, unless he asked for a second helping of osso buco the night before--release one hundred kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That's not counting the taxi rides to Linate Airport at one end and from Orly at the other, probably in a fuming snarl of traffic. Should he go overnight by train, the journey will be more circuitous, and maybe thirty miles longer, but the CO2 output will be under four kilos. That's quite a difference, and it's genuinely hard to spot a downside, unless it's the annoying halo of ethical self-satisfaction atop our traveller's head.

Will flygskam have any lasting effect on commercial enterprise? The signs are (or were, before the advent of covid-19) distinctly promising. A new Nightjet train from Vienna to Brussels, established by Austrian Federal Railways, or Ö.B.B., and lauded by its C.E.O., Andreas Matthä, as "an eco-friendly travel option to the E.U. capital," had its inaugural run on January 19th. A serious journey, at just over fourteen hours. Ö.B.B. estimates that the rest of its night network has already saved the world twelve thousand short-haul flights a year: a delicious irony, given how greedily the budget airlines have eaten into train travel in recent decades. Further resurrections lie ahead, not least new sleeper services from Vienna and Munich to Amsterdam, slated for December of this year. One can but hope that such enviable schemes, intended to address the climate crisis, will not be stopped in their tracks by the rival plight through which we currently sweat.

The third reason to choose a sleeper train--and the most compelling--is no more practical than the taste of a peach. At stake, you might say, is a sense of latent adventure. Although it is unlikely, as you clatter through the night, that anything of note will befall you, the prospect that it could feels ever present, just out of sight beyond the next curve of the track. To remain awake to that possibility, even as we're meant to be sleeping, is the privilege that beckons some of us back, year after year, to this awkward and beguiling locomotion.

No wonder trains and movies make such cozy bedfellows--so cozy that a train zipping through the darkness, with windows illuminated, actually looks like a strip of film. Plots, laid down on rails, dash ever onward; anticipation rises like steam. Consider Claudette Colbert, in "The Palm Beach Story," who falls in with the rowdy millionaires of the Ale and Quail Club. Sweeping her up as a mascot, and boarding the 11:58 from Penn Station with a pack of hounds, they think nothing of firing their shotguns at crackers, tossed up by a bar steward like clay pigeons. As for Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes," the lady in question is a grandmotherly secret agent, who, before she disappears, daubs her name on the misted window of the dining car. A ridiculous method, in any other time and place, of leaving your mark; on a night train, though, it seems only right and proper.

If you don't believe me, you have to believe Cary Grant. In "North by Northwest" (more Hitchcock), he boards the Twentieth Century, from New York to Chicago, without a ticket. By chance--or so he thinks--he meets Eva Marie Saint, first in the corridor and then in the dining car, where he orders a Gibson and, on her recommendation, the brook trout. The two of them return to her compartment, where, during a police inspection, she conceals Grant in the foldaway top bunk. Later, as daylight fails, they lean against the wall of the compartment and kiss, over and over, her hands caressing the back of his neck. "Beats flying, doesn't it?" he says to her. Sure does.

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