Originally Posted by
Palal
In the EU, overnight trains have been decimated by LCCs. Demand has been going down year after year, resulting in elimination of many routes that fail to make a profit. The only place where you'll find them is Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, etc.) where they're still the primary way of intercity travel.
The first couple of chapters of
this recent study provides some insights on conventional night trains.
Most of the overnight trains with sleepers in western Europe have indeed been dropped in the past 50 years - mostly because of automobiles and (more recently) cheap airfares and high-speed day trains, but there are still several left, primarily in Scandinavia, Italy and Germany. The German railroad got our of the overnight train business last year (as the French, Dutch, Danes and Belgians did earlier), and the Austrian railroad took over many of their trains, so one can still travel in comfort overnight between Germany, Austria and Italy. The Austrians say their overnight services are profitable, and once their new sleeper are delivered, they expect to resume some overnight services, probably to Denmark, the Netherlands and maybe France. And there are still overnight sleeper services to Croatia, Hungary, Poland/Belarus/Russia and Romania from western Europe. But even there rail is no longer the "primary way of intercity travel," certainly not on overnight trains.