Good evening

Few modes of transport encapsulate the romance, excitement – and potential discomfort – of travel better than the night train. Bedding down in a sleeping compartment as the train pulls out of a city in the dying light, being rocked to sleep (or not) by the motion of the carriage and pulling up the blinds bleary-eyed the next morning to find sunlight seeping across the fields and rooftops of an unfamiliar country.

Monisha Rajesh’s love affair with sleeper trains was first kindled on a four month trip across India in 2010. She quickly came to realise that rail travel – and in particular overnight journeys – offered far more than a means of getting from A to B. As other passengers slept, she would make notes on her day and absorb the scenes of ordinary life unfolding outside the window: “bored drivers playing cards on car bonnets; the twentysomething winking at me from the back of her boyfriend’s moped as they careered towards the beach. Each moment felt like a gift, and while I hadn’t realised it at the time, I was already immersed in slow travel.

”From Scotland’s Caledonian Sleeper to Finland’s Santa Claus Express, Monisha has spent much of the last 15 years criss-crossing continents by rail, and has collected some of her favourite nocturnal journeys in a new book, ‘Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train’. In an evocative piece for the Guardian she reflects on the recent resurgence in sleeper services across Europe, which have made an unexpected comeback in the face of competition from budget airlines and high-speed rail services. Night trains may not be able to compete on speed – or even price – but what they offer is something potentially far more valuable: “Time to reconnect with friends as we moved through the darkness…time to slow down and shut off, watching as the world whipped by my window and my thoughts calmed to a kind of meditation.”