>>1893627There used to be a sleeper train between Barcelona and Milan, so you could have done Milan-Barcelona-Madrid in one night and a 3hr HSR trip, but the Spaniards canceled all the international sleepers when they openes the HSR line to France (which doesn't even connect to a French HSR line so Barcelona-Paris is over 6 hours), because it was totally overbuilt so they wanted to force passengers into the cross-borser HSR trains, so they canceled the three remaining international sleepers from Barcelona to Paris, Zurich and Milan.
The sad irony about HSR is that it has hurt long-distance rail travel, especially sleepers, because HSR is built between large cities and through populated regions, and planned with a lot of political criteria inside the country, so something like Spain-Italy doesn't have the passenger or political demand (bc Spain and Italy aren't neighboring countries and France sees little gain in a HSR line paralleling the Mediterranean coast). So it all comes down to where HSR is available people take the train, but where it isn't long-distance rail travel becomes unfeasible.
If you look at international train travel in Europe up until the 80s-90s you had many more options than now. Now it's usually just either a top tier HSR service, or a shit tier Intercity type trip with poorly timed changeovers. If at all. ÖBB is rebuilding night trains practically by itself, France kept very few sleepers, but not having canceled them all probably helped to now start redeveloping the sleeper network, however they're just within France. One even runs from Paris to the Spanish border and you can take a 3 hour regional train to Barcelona from there. Maybe they'll partner with ÖBB eventually or something.
Spain seems to not want any sleeper trains, and if they haven't canceled the last ones yet (mainly Barcelona-Galicia) they will do so soon.
