the.com/night train
The train where strangers trust each other to sleep eight inches apart.
means An overnight passenger train with sleeping cars, built for travelers who want to cover long distances while unconscious.
from A plain compound of 'night' and 'train,' describing exactly what it is rather than hiding behind cleverness. The phrase gained its romantic, slightly melancholy charge less from railway timetables than from music and film — blues and folk songs used 'night train' as shorthand for travel, escape, and longing, riding the same rails as the literal overnight sleeper services that boomed with industrial-age railroads moving people long distances while they slept.
- origin
- sleeper cars predate cheap flights by a century
- economics
- revived lately as flight-shaming makes rails trendy again
- ambiance
- somehow both romantic and smells faintly of instant noodles
- cargo slang
- also code for cheap fortified wine in old blues songs