Earlier today I tooted about how the Scottish government had taken back control of the Caledonian sleeper from Serco. There’s an obvious parallel here with the Melbourne Adelaide train service, but that’s not my topic here.

For along time the Caledonian Sleeper was an anachronism, with elderly railcars rattling between Scotland and London depositing its unwashed passengers after an overnight journey.

Dating from a time before freeways and discount airlines it offered a way of getting from Scotland to London overnight without losing a day travelling.

When I’ve been back to the UK  I’d occasionally looked at it as a semi nostalgic way to get to Scotland from London to visit family, but the general inconvenience of the journey counted against it – no showers, unpleasantly early arrival times into Glasgow or Edinburgh, and the sheer hassle of picking up a rental car from the central train station and battling through early morning traffic were all negatives.

Since I last looked into using it, it has been upgraded to a moderately swanky tourist experience.

Now, I’ve never actually travelled on the Caledonian sleeper as was – when I was a young man and needed to get to mainland Europe from Scotland I usually got a daytime train to London, and then the overnight boat train – no Channel tunnel then – which sounded romantic, but if you were travelling economy was a fairly basic experience invariably involving a train from Dieppe to Paris at a time you’d rather not be awake.

However, I did use the Edinburgh Bristol sleeper on a few occasions. Now forgotten, it used to run, not surprisingly, from Edinburgh to Bristol via Birmingham.

Catching it to or from Birmingham, which I did several times, was bad news as it meant a midnight or thereabouts departure before being dumped in Edinburgh at about half past six, meaning you only really got about six hours sleep. Travelling the other way meant you had to get off just before six, and where possible I tried to get a daytime or evening train the night before.

However an economy sleeper ticket was more pleasant than sitting up overnight in an economy coach, which was usually some old compartment based ex-LMS coach that looked as it had last been cleaned in 1948.

If you did travel the whole way to Bristol it was better, they gave you tea and biscuits on arrival, and they didn’t chuck you off until after seven. That, and there used to be a place on the concourse that did a decent bacon and tomato roll and a cup of coffee, before getting a train on to Wales.

Coming back wasn’t too shabby either, they had a nice waiting area for sleeper passengers with a pleasant bar and you could get something half decent to eat. Unfortunately, the arrival in Edinburgh wasn’t quite so pleasant, but at least you’d usually had a decent night’s sleep.

I used to find I slept well on these old rattly railcars – while the train wasn’t the smoothest or the fastest I found the rocking motion quite relaxing, much as I found the Sunlander back in 2014.

But it’s strange. While the news is full of the Caledonian sleeper’s renationalisation, there’s very little online about the old 1980’s sleeper services, it’s almost as if they never were …