IELTS Academic Reading – Practice Passage 5

Reading Passage

AFor much of the twentieth century the night train was simply how Europeans crossed their continent. Travellers boarded in one capital in the evening, ate dinner as the lights of the suburbs slid past, and stepped down the next morning in another country with the whole day still ahead of them. Famous named expresses carried passengers from every walk of life, and a dense web of sleeper routes tied the far corners of the continent together. By the late 1990s, however, the sleeping car was in steep decline. Budget airlines were selling seats for less than the price of a berth, and new high-speed lines made it possible to cross large distances between breakfast and lunch. One operator after another withdrew its overnight services, sold off its ageing carriages and quietly closed the routes; by about 2015 many people assumed that the night train belonged firmly to the past.

BWhat has changed since then has less to do with railways than with the way travellers count the cost of a journey. Supporters of the sleeper point out that an overnight service converts travelling time into sleeping time: a passenger who leaves at ten in the evening and arrives at seven the next morning has surrendered no working day at either end. There is no long ride out to a distant airport, no queue at security and no wait at a baggage belt, because the train starts in the centre of one city and stops in the centre of another. Since the night itself is spent on board, the fare also replaces the cost of a hotel room, which makes a berth that looks expensive at first rather easier to justify.

CThe stronger argument, though, is environmental. Aviation releases a large quantity of carbon dioxide for every passenger carried, and burning fuel at high altitude produces further warming effects, such as the condensation trails left behind an aircraft, that do not arise at ground level. An electric train drawing power from a grid that includes wind, hydro and nuclear generation produces only a small fraction of those emissions over the same distance. Campaigners have placed this contrast at the centre of their case, and in several countries the decision to take the train instead of the plane for climate reasons has acquired its own name, its own online following and a noticeable pull among younger travellers, who are the group most likely to say that they would change how they travel.

DYet the commercial reality remains awkward. A sleeping car carries far fewer paying passengers than an ordinary seated coach of the same length, because beds take up space that seats would fill. The carriages themselves are complex vehicles, fitted with plumbing, heating and locking systems that a day coach does not need, and they are correspondingly expensive to buy and to maintain. For about two decades almost no European operator ordered new ones, so those that survived were running vehicles built in the 1980s. Staff must be paid to work through the night, and the train has to be cleaned and serviced during the day, when it is earning nothing at all.

ECrossing borders adds a second layer of difficulty that has nothing to do with beds. A train running overnight from one side of the continent to the other may pass through four national networks, each with its own signalling system, its own safety rules and its own charge for the use of the track. Locomotives have to be approved for every country they enter and drivers qualified for every network they work on. Selling the journey can be harder than operating it: there is still no single platform on which the tickets of every European railway can be booked together, so a passenger may end up buying several separate tickets and hoping that a delay on one does not destroy the value of the next.

FEven so, the sleeper has begun to reappear. From 2016 the Austrian state operator took over a group of overnight routes that a larger neighbour had abandoned, rebranded them and then extended the network year by year, restoring connections to cities that had lost their night services a decade earlier. Occupancy on many of these trains has been high enough to surprise the industry, and the company has ordered a fleet of new carriages designed around what today’s passengers say they want: small private cabins for people travelling alone, rather than the shared compartments of the past. Other operators, several of them small and privately financed, have announced routes of their own, and a number of governments have offered support to overnight services that could not survive on ticket revenue alone.

GWhether all this amounts to a genuine revival or merely a fashionable niche will be settled by decisions that are largely political rather than technical. Fuel for international flights is untaxed almost everywhere in Europe, while railways pay for every kilometre of track they use, so the two modes do not compete on equal terms. If those charges were rebalanced, and if booking a cross-border journey were made as simple as booking a flight, the night train could take a serious share of medium-distance travel. If neither happens, it will remain what it is today: a pleasant and slightly romantic option for people willing to plan ahead, much loved and much photographed, but marginal.