>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?

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.

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-

Yes, the bottle Beck for night trains is rolling stock.

The plan is to initially target refurbished standard passenger couches. We have a large research and development consortium to develop the technology and adaptation of coaches.

The refurb itself can be done by many companies, we don’t need a large supplier like Siemens.

As for the ÖBB nightjet, there’s talk about shifting the last ordered nightjet to rail jets (for day travel). Speculation is that the low capacity of the Trainsets result in poor unit economics.

Yes, we’re connected with back on track! I’m a day-one member of the German branch. A bunch of their members came and participated in our tests.

We’re participating in their night train conference in September in Berlin, probably bringing a physical prototype.

We’re working on standard railcars, which can be running together with traditional couchettes railcars. I would argue that group travel is largely a „solved“ problem, using couchettes (railcars with cabins having 4-6 beds).

For couples, the smaller pods actually kind of „face“ each other across the aisles.

Thanks!

We considered connecting pods. The orientation „behind“ each other makes interaction difficult.

They way this issue was „resolved“ more less naturally during testing is that the pods all have The same orientation, so pods across the aisle approximately face each other. In our lab we had two iterations of the pods set up to face each other, and tester and testee interacted quite naturally —- once we set up our test rig like that, the questions „what about couples“ reduced a lot, most understood the vis-a-vis intuitively.

Our bigger cabins have two ppl versions, but a lot (if not most) travel is individua anyway, especially if night trains will be used for work travel.

The UK has adequate loading gauge for double deckers on HS1/Chunnel and HS2 (though I'm not sure if the Euston extension will support it or not).

We can run London - Europe double decker today and if we connected HS2 to HS1 it would probably be possible to run from Birmingham, Crewe and Manchester to continental Europe too.

We have them in Switzerland. Often had to change train at the border and never thought it could be a technical limitation.

The „current“ concept is for refurbished standard passenger coaches, which is compatible everywhere in Europe except UK.

The „long term“ concept is built around to be compatible with profiles UIC GB and G2, which work in most of Europe.