Comment by bombcar
1 day ago
It really never wins against a plane or even car except where everything lines up perfectly and you can treat an overnight sleeper train as a rolling hotel, check in, eat, sleep, eat, walk out where you need to be.
It’s such a good experience that building the rest of the trip around it can be worthwhile, but it is still not terribly fast.
Yeah, if you get a sleeper and figure you're saving a night in London or Edinburgh and you don't need to deal with airports, something like the Caledonian Sleeper isn't a bad deal or really consume a lot of extra time. But if you're not in a hurry, it's still a good experience for a lot of people.
But then I've also done a trans-Atlantic crossing but I was semi-retired at the time. Which I would do again at some point but was certainly neither cost nor time efficient.