Lovely report, thanks for sharing.

You are so right, there is something enchanting about the sleeper.

On the face of it, you are travelling in an archaic mode (sleeper trains across Europe are being cancelled), in rolling stock nearly 40 years old. But once inside the cabin you are residing in the atmosphere changes entirely. Perhaps I have been too influenced by notions of Poirot and the Orient Express, but a sense of purpose, of understated luxury, of a slower pace of life revered through the window. Seeing the world, but not in it. Perhaps it's the notion of being the only light across Rannoch Moor in the dead of a winter night, the little square of light from your window the last light before the abyss. The journey feels like it could go on forever, forgetting that the journey is normally done on a commuter DMU.

I haven't taken the Deerstalker in a while, but I have taken the Penzance sleeper. Just a few hours later I travelled through some of the same stations on the normal service train, and the romance was gone.

Perhaps its the cold light of day? Who knows.

But thanks for sharing!