Originally Posted by
stut
It's pretty common in Europe. In the UK, for example, you can get from London to Glasgow or Edinburgh in a little over 4 hours by day train. The night train, however, takes 7h30. Not only do you get a smoother ride and allow slack for engineering works, the train leaves and arrives at far more sociable hours, making it a much more attractive prospect.
Most of the shorter routes on the CityNightLine network are like this too.
Yes. Shorter routes.
Because a night train little over 4 hours is, indeed, stopping at unsociable hours.
But what about routes that are so long that the fastest day train is 10 hours already, like Beijing-Shanghai, D31 takes 9:52 for 1463 km?
What would then be the point of a night train being slower and taking 18 hours?
Do night trains travel slower to provide smoother ride? Or, when they do, solely and exclusively to stretch the trip out for sufficient bedtime?