How can you stay up in those for 7 hours non stop? Is it just luck with the weather or can you really stay up indefinitely with these things if you have enough skill?

Where’s this information from that people are complaining about night trains being axed even though they are not being axed are flying anyway? That contradicts my experiences. Usually you need to buy places in night trains a long time in advance because they tend to run full-booked.

Also, China has high-speed night trains.
We could do the same. The infrastructure is in place for a night train from Stockholm to Barcelona. I would leave around six and arrive around ten. China is doing that, why are we not?

Hamburg HBf is an extremely congested station. That means, it’s difficult to find a slot for your train there and the risk of delays is especially high in Hamburg.
Also, at Hamburg HBf the train would need to be reversed, which takes some half an hour of time with a train that doesn’t have a steering wagon in its other end.

This could be alleviated by running through the Hamburg-Harburg station, which is reachable from HBf by S-Bahn in a bit under 15 minutes, but by doing that, you lose a lot of the potential for changing trains from Scandinavia and Finland to this night train for Paris.

Even though for me personally a route through Hamburg HBf would be very welcome, I hope it won’t go that way. It seems to be, all in all, much better for the European railway network that the train will take the more direct way from Berlin to Belgium.

In France the track usage fees are very high, and you need state support to be able to cover them. Germany, for example, doesn’t give such subventions to night train companies.

European Sleeper can run to Paris because they have chosen a route where they minimize the kilometres run on French territory.

But indeed: Where are those lines really fighting closure? Currently all of Europe’s night train wagons are in use, and if some connection is closed, the same amount of capacity (the same wagons) will appear elsewhere in Europe.

I don’t think we’d be having trouble with the availability of wagons if things were as you claim.

Hamburg must be just a mix-up by the French reporter. Hannover must have been meant, I believe.