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.

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matt-p 7 hours ago | parent [-]

We have sleeper trains in the UK, it would obviously be great if they were cheaper but honestly there's not that much demand for travel from London - Scotland or Penzance in general. This is exacerbated by the fact a daytime train is easily doable so it's a bit of weird, niche product.

However the amount of demand there'd be for an overnight train from (let's just say) London to Barcelona at £99 each way would be immense.

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ant6n 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You can run London to Europe via HS1 and tunnel, but the operating costs are insane. Anybody who propose that would get shut down by the „rail bubble“ extremely hard (like midnight trains did a couple years back). I think it would be nice, but it’s far off.

As for intra-UK sleeper: yes there are some possible routes, but the market is small. Developing custom trains for that would be very expensive. And the concepts we propose don’t work well cut the profile is so small.

	▲	matt-p 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This was true a few years ago, but today the regulatory environment is very positive for these kind of services. You will see many non-eurostar open access operators on those tracks within the next year or two. I wouldn't massively bother with intra-uk yet, I agree wholeheartedly.