At a quarter to eleven on a wet Tuesday in Brussels, Amara Whitlock-Nwosu is walking the length of her train with a torch. She checks the couplings, peers into the galley and stops to ask a conductor whether the new mattresses have arrived in carriage four. They have. She nods and moves on. The Nocturne to Vienna leaves in twenty minutes, and the founder and chief executive of Lanterna Rail is, as she is at least once a week, a passenger on it.
Whitlock-Nwosu spent eighteen years in aviation, rising to run network planning for a large European carrier. She was, by her own account, very good at it. But she grew uneasy with an industry that measured success in the number of short flights it could squeeze into a day. In 2019 she resigned, took a year to travel the continent by rail, and returned with a business plan and a conviction that the night train had been abandoned too soon.
Buying carriages nobody wanted
Her first purchase was a set of twenty-two sleeper carriages retired by a national operator and parked in a siding in northern Italy, where they had been slowly rusting for six years. She bought them for less than the price of a small apartment, then spent two years and considerably more money restoring them. The interiors were rebuilt by a joinery workshop in Slovenia, with oak panelling, reading lamps, proper wardrobes and windows that actually open.
Lanterna now runs six routes linking eleven cities, from Amsterdam to Budapest and Paris to Venice, and carried more than four hundred thousand passengers last year. It is not yet profitable, a fact Whitlock-Nwosu states plainly. Track access charges are high, rolling stock is scarce and competition from budget airlines remains fierce. Her investors, a mix of pension funds and family offices, have been told to expect a long wait. So far, they have been patient.
An aeroplane moves you. A night train gives you back an evening you would otherwise have lost to an airport. That is the product. — Amara Whitlock-Nwosu
Colleagues describe her as calm, exacting and allergic to hype. She reads every passenger complaint personally, keeps a spreadsheet ranking the breakfasts on each route, and has been known to rewrite the wording of cabin signs herself. Staff turnover is unusually low. Many of her conductors came from the old state sleeper services and were delighted to return to work they thought had vanished for good.
The Nocturne pulls out of Brussels on time. Whitlock-Nwosu retires to her compartment with a folder of route proposals and a paper cup of chamomile. She will wake somewhere in Bavaria, walk to the restaurant car and ask the chef how the new bread supplier is working out. By the time the train reaches Vienna, she will have filled three pages with notes. Then she will take the afternoon train home and start again.
