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-

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matt-p 7 hours ago | parent [-]

No they don't. You use the same hub to hub model as airlines. E.g London to Edinburgh, not London to Edinburgh stopping in 4 places.

One of the nice things about traveling at night is you have less time pressure and congestion so when doing track repairs it's usually fine to divert the train.

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Freak_NL 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yup. These two points are not an issue at all, and are in fact strengths for sleeper trains. Being able to redirect a sleeper train without any (or minimal) impact on its timetable is a big plus.

Usually they depart from the last boarding station around midnight, and the first disembarking station won't be hit until six in the morning. Some outliers exist, but the number of people getting on or off there is negligible. For most travellers you are in the train before 22:00, and won't leave before 6:00.

This ÖBB line is typical: https://www.nightjet.com/de/reiseziele/oesterreich/wien

Yes, you can get off in Nürnberg at 4:08. But almost no one does that. The train just happens to have a halt there¹, but 95% of the passengers get on in the Netherlands and the Ruhr Area, and won't get off until Austria (and vice versa).

1: I suspect mostly for rail topological reasons.

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bluGill 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hub to hub - does that mean you wake everyone at 3am to change trains? Nobody switches cars with humans in them.

	▲	Freak_NL an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Nobody switches cars with humans in them. What do you mean? Changing the train consist during the trip? That is exactly what they can do. Hamburg/Amsterdam on one end, Innsbruck/Wien on the other. Those wagons get shuffled about like a deck of cards en route! So in Amsterdam there is one train with wagons marked Wien and wagons marked Innsbruck. You get in the right numbered wagon, and end up where you want. In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere (actually, probably München) they turn two trains into two different trains. Most people never notice.