Here’s the trick, finally coming home on night 1: your willingness to take a long distance train journey is impacted heavily by your ability to fall asleep on the moving train.
For me, someone of my height, this isn’t great. There’s a couple factors in the way: fitting in the space of any of the seats as they’re currently configured; the ability to sleep with the cabin lights set to “on”; constant braking, decelerating to wait at a stop, then taking off again; other people in the cabin returning from a 1am smokebreak smelling like they ate the whole thing.
All of which are deal-breakers for me.
The thing is, I don’t know if the more high class lux fares would solve this problem either. Certainly it can help with a few, but the berths and sleepers are a) still too short, leaving me folded up in some way, and b) still subject to physics in the same way as everything else on the train.
Alas. Only 4 more nights to go. this one’s barely started.
Bonus: I do like having the dining car to myself at this hour though. Nice stuff. Peaceful. Able to get the first five posts typed up. There might be some unseen bonuses to this type of travel yet.