Setting up a railway company from scratch in France is an obstacle course. Following the liquidation of Railcoop last March, it is now the turn of start-up Midnight Trains to call it a day. Launched in 2020 by three partners, its ambition was to create a higher quality night train service, a hotel on rails with private cabins and a catering offer worthy of the name. And all this from Paris to European capitals or key tourist destinations. Just like the first route on the roadmap: Paris-Milan-Venice, a service stopped by Thelloa subsidiary of Trenitaliain July 2021.
While the first round of funding was successfully raised from around forty business angels, enabling the technical specifications and design of the trains to be drawn up, the second, more capital-intensive stage, with the rolling stock being ordered from the chosen manufacturer, was a failure. This was despite the presence among the project's initiators of Adrien Aumont, co-founder of the KissKissBankBank co-funding platform. So it was lack of capital that the adventure is coming to an end, the three partners of Midnight Trains even regretting in the long joint press release published on their website that they had not taken this decision earlier. However, the young company did not even go so far as to apply for its railway company licence or safety certificate.
The reasons for the failure of Midnight Trains
In their assessment, they list the reasons for this failure. The first is the belief that, in the face of an aviation sector that still emits a great deal of CO2their vision of carbon-free travel by night train would be shared more widely by financiers" . And to observe that " the money and energy of the public authorities are concentrated on energies and therefore, in our case, on clean aircraft rather than on uses or improving what already exists" . In the end, they feel that investors are not in tune with a project like Midnight Trains: " On the one hand, seed funds do not invest in long-term projects with assets to operate. On the other hand, infrastructure funds do not invest in young companies and have very little interest in rail. And finally, growth funds invest in growth and rarely take the commercial risk of starting up a business." .
Their second disappointment was the reality of opening up the market to competition. " The texts are open, but in practice, the rail market has mainly opened up to itself. This market was organised by the public authorities for their own historic operators, the emergence of new players" . The only ones with the means and the trains to take advantage of this opening up are, in their view, the national companies of each European country that disembark at their neighbours'. The final criticism concerns the current circulation of night trains in France and Europe, which are often not given priority, with operators having to juggle with the work being carried out on the tracks at night, such as the passage of freight trains. This leads to recurrent delays, such as the Paris-Berlin line inaugurated in December 2023.
" We sincerely hope that over the next few years the European Commission, the governments of the Member States and the organising authorities will build a railway capable of welcoming new innovative companies, invite the founding partners of Midnight Trains to reflect. We hope that this momentum will enable investment funds to take an interest in the rail sector, so that other entrepreneurs can create new uses and improve the rail travel experience." .
