European Sleeper Once Again!

In the Dutch language, we have a popular saying "A donkey does not stumble over the same stone twice". Obviously, the meaning is that you should learn from your mistakes, as the donkey does. I prefer an alternative interpretation, however: if you don't want to be an ass, be sure to remake your mistakes. ;-)

So, to stumble over the same stone twice, I tried taking the European Sleeper night train again. Last time I took it, it was generally okay, but it left us stranded for three hours in a Berlin station until 2AM. This made me nervous to try it again, but at least this time I knew what I was potentially getting into.

To give myself some more comfort, I splurged on the most expensive compartment: the "Comfort Plus". Compared to the couchettes, this compartment only has three beds, each with a real mattress! It actually made a surprising difference.

Messy sleeper compartment after sleeping the night.

All three beds are on the same wall, with one seat on the other side of the compartment, and two other seats hidden away under the bottom bed. Reaching the top bed can be done via a removable ladder (not shown here).

Another bonus: the sleeper compartments have private washbasins. In the couchette wagon, there were only two washbasins (right next to the toilets), meaning you had to brush your teeth in the hallway. While they obviously aren't super-luxurious, it's still a nice-to-have.

By the broad smile on my face, you can probably deduce that I had a good night's rest!

But you know what really exudes luxury though? Equipping each compartment with a reproduction of Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss". :-)

In the morning, we also got a complimentary breakfast consisting of a cracker, bread bun, yoghurt, granola, jam/nutella, a coffee and orange juice. Normally this would cost you 15 (!) euro, which is an insanely high price that I would likely never have paid.

I did pay four euro for another coffee though, as my caffeine-driven brain would otherwise start complaining. Curiously, it was not just an instant coffee like the one pictured above, but to my joy it contained actual coffee grounds! The lid simply has a filter included to ensure only liquids can pass, which I had never seen before but worked surprisingly well. No wonder it labels itself as "SUPERLID". :-)

The lid also said "patent pending". Perhaps we'll see more of these types of coffee cups in the future?

Okay, obviously you're now wondering: "Simon, did this second trip change your opinion in any way?" And I'm happy to say it did, in the positive sense! It wasn't so much the trip itself that caused the change, though it did go much smoother this time around. Instead, I had a great conversation with one of the people I was sharing my compartment with on the way back to Brussels.

When making initial small talk, this man, who's name I forgot to ask, told me that he regularly takes the sleeper train as he lives near Berlin but owns a sailing boat near Amsterdam. The only reason why this made sense, at least to him, is the fact that he could easily take this train to travel between locations without losing a lot of daytime. (I know, this sounded slightly insane to me to, but to each their own. :-))

Now, get this: ever since European Sleeper started, he's been using the service monthly-ish. In that entire time, he's never had any of the big issues you sometimes read about online! By my count, that's about 28 trips using the sleeper train, none of which had any big issues. This made me realise that what happened to us last time was really a one-off thing.

While the price is still very steep, I do now consider European Sleeper a quality way of traveling, at least to my standards, and I look forward to traveling with them again.