I spent the night in a capsule aboard Europe’s new low-budget sleeper train

Austria’s wallet-friendly Nightjet might be the future of overnight rail journeys – but has minimalism now gone too far?

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Sleeper trains come in two main flavours. The first is what you’re probably imagining now – opulent carriages, a handsome locomotive, Michelin-starred chefs and four-figure fares. The second is the more workaday variety: the common-or-garden night train. These offer an efficient and eco-friendly way to travel between cities overnight, giving you the advantage of a full day at your destination for less than the price of an additional night in a hotel. 
Less, that is, so long as you opt for a shared couchette – essentially a cramped, mobile hostel dorm. If you prefer a bit of privacy, you’ll need to fork out for a first-class cabin, and these can set you back several hundred pounds.
But now, at last, there is a third option: the new “mini cabin” sleeper pods on the Nightjet trains run by Austrian state railway company ÖBB. Launched in September and costing as little as £37 one way, these new Japanese-style capsules instantly set the rail world abuzz. Had the gap between affordable, undignified shared cabins, and comfortable, expensive first class rooms finally been bridged? I booked my ticket immediately.
As yet, only a handful of Nightjet routes use the new-style carriages with mini cabins – Hamburg-Vienna, Hamburg-Innsbruck, Vienna-Rome and Bregenz-Vienna (a Munich-Rome service is currently out of action, but will reopen in July next year) – with more likely to follow in 2025. 
I was headed for Vienna, and decided to make a weekend of my journey, travelling from London to Paris (2hrs by Eurostar), then Paris to Bregenz at Austria’s western tip (14hrs tortuous hours overnight in a shared couchette, with a 6am change in Munich). After a pleasant day spent in the little lakeside city, I hopped aboard the Nightjet – departing at 9.40pm, and due to arrive in Vienna a neat 10 hours later, at 7.40am. 
On board, the new Nightjet was reminiscent of older sleeper trains, with a narrow corridor running the length of the carriage, with compartments taking up the bulk of the width and shared facilities at one end. But the carriages on this new-style train each contained a few dozen numbered pods, arranged over two levels like the lockers in a gym. It didn’t take long to find my capsule for the night. 
The mini cabin itself is well-designed and surprisingly feature rich. The wide doorway, a roller shutter, opens to reveal a wide and fairly inviting aperture into which the traveller must crawl. On the floor of this space is a fitted cushion a few inches deep, upholstered in coarse fabric reminiscent of an office cubicle wall, and at the far end is a porthole window looking out onto the track and station beyond. It is, honestly, nicer than it sounds. 
A rail runs the length of the cabin, out of which folds a small table, which can be adjusted for meals or working with a laptop, and which also – when stowed upright – reveals a mirror. The world’s most self-explanatory evacuation procedure is detailed on a card stored in a pouch on the same wall. 
It’s on the other side that things get interesting. Each mini cabin is enclosed, but they come in pairs. Between each adjacent cabin is another shutter which – if both occupants set the knob to the “unlocked” position – can be left open (useful if travelling with a partner).  
Above the hatch is a control panel, which allows the occupant to set both the intensity and colour of the light; I chose a warm yellow glow, others opted for more aggressive hues. Helpfully, this panel also shows when the loo is occupied, avoiding wasted trips down from your pod. 
There’s also a wireless charging pad, an emergency alarm, a plug socket, and a little cradle to hold your cabin’s key card, which also opens two storage compartments outside your cabin – one for your bag, the other for your shoes. The cabin’s length is not overly generous (at 192cm tall, my feet and head just about touched their respective ends), but neither do they feel cramped.
Having investigated every inch of my little nest, I turned in for the night – and there, the problems started. The train itself was very quiet, but that meant I could hear my immediate neighbour’s every cough, exhale and movement through the hatch (and I assume vice versa). 
Further down the carriage, in one of the larger compartments, some cheery students were giggling, drifting to the loos and back in excitable groups of two and three. I also quickly noticed that, for some reason, the lighting controls beep whenever they are fiddled with, meaning that any time some fidget decided to change the colour of their cabin, the whole carriage would hear them do it. 
In fact, it wasn’t until the train began pausing at various stations throughout the night, taking on more passengers, that the mini cabin’s benefits truly came into their own. In a normal sleeper compartment with four or six couchette beds, this would have been a noisy and intrusive process, as new arrivals found their bunks and those nearby were jostled awake. 
But with my little door shut, I found it easy to block all this out, and never worried about blocking anyone with my bag, or hogging the plug sockets, or having to gently inform someone they were in the wrong place. Similarly, the distant sound of youthful gallumphing in the corridor was preferable to the ruckus you get in a shared compartment.
I’ll concede that this isolation isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. For some, half the point of sleeper trains is the conviviality – meeting fellow travellers, sharing stories and tepid lager, making empty promises to meet up again in Berlin (not that there’s anywhere much to socialise, bar a fold-down bench opposite each set of capsules). But on this occasion I was eager to get some sleep, and pleased to gently close my cabin door. 
It was not a completely uninterrupted night – the stopping and starting of any overnight train is difficult to ignore; the temperature in my pod was somewhat erratic; and on two occasions, its lights switched on without my say-so – but I felt reasonably refreshed when I did eventually surface, greeted by a simple breakfast of bread rolls, jam and butter delivered to my cabin. I ached to shower, but such luxuries are reserved for the swells in first-class sleepers.
All that said, I’m already booked in to repeat the experience. It’s not for everybody – the quality of service is patchy despite the space-age cabins, and you arrive at your destination yearning for a (stationary) hotel room and a nice warm shower. But the existence of these new Nightjet services, enabling you to travel while you sleep, in reasonable privacy, for less than £100, will change the way both business and leisure users think about sleeper trains. 
And despite its shortcomings, I’d choose a night in a mini cabin over a short-haul flight every time. 
ÖBB offers Nightjet mini cabin fares €44.90 (£37) for Bregenz to Vienna one-way (select “Couchette Carriage” then “Mini Cabin” when booking). Mini cabins are available on selected services between Vienna, Innsbruck, Bregenz and Hamburg, and between Munich and Rome from summer 2025. 
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