Sleeper trains are back and they’re bringing with them a world of refined, transformable interiors that turn every class of travel into a spacious, sleek experience to rival and transcend the air travel alternative. At least, that’s the takeaway from the Day/Dream concept developed by specialist transportation design bureau PriestmanGoode in collaboration with three key material partners, Testori, Kydex and Muirhead.
First Class in daytime use
Together, the design team has incorporated a swathe of modern materials across a fantasy triple-level train that offers the perfect inter-city travel solution for a sun-dappled European landscape. It’s utopian, for sure, but despite writing this from a cramped standard class seat on an overcrowded, highly delayed service into a different London terminus than I originally booked, the allure of truly sorted train travel is still strong.
First Class in daytime use
Day/Dream envisages a well-staffed trans-European service that includes an onboard hospitality crew who supervise the transformation of the carriage layout from day to night configurations. Unusually, the layouts can be converted across all three classes, standard, business and first, turning the train into an overnight sleeping environment.
Boarding the Day/Dream Concept
Boarding the Day/Dream Concept
PriestmanGoode note that the idea came partly from their copious experience in the aviation sector, where they’ve worked on everything from private jet concepts to Finnair’s AirLounge business class seat to Lufthansa’s First Class Suite configuration, along with work for United, Airbus and Korean Air, amongst others.
There’s also plenty of rail in their portfolio – the agency is one of the go-to suppliers for all forms of railway, from London’s Piccadilly and Elizabeth Lines to Austrian Federal Railways and VIA Rail in Canada, with a clutch of industry awards to acknowledge their contribution.
The new concept was unveiled at InnoTrans 2026, Berlin’s International Trade Fair for Transport Technology. Working with ‘image-infused thermoplastic’ from Kydex, plant-based recyclable fabric from Testori and BioTan low-carbon leather by Muirhead, the interior owes as much to hospitality design as it does transportation.
The reconfigurable interior is reshaped depending on the time of day and has been sized to fit within existing European rolling stock. According to PriestmanGoode, the main aim of the exercise was a ‘deliberate move away from the couchette model that defines most existing overnight rail provision’. Instead, multifunctional spaces preserve capacity and increase comfort.
‘Day/Dream is designed around the lounge as the primary social space, one that belongs equally to every passenger on board, regardless of how they have chosen to sleep,’ says the designers, explaining how, unlike in aviation, ‘privacy is tiered; the experience is not. A passenger in a shared sleeping space and one in a private cabin share the same lounge, the same quality of environment, the same sense of occasion.’
Business Class seating during the day
The idea is that a different set of passengers will use the train at different times of the day. For commuting, First, Business and Economy all function as normal; at night, a separate set of overnight travellers boards the transformed carriage interior; while a Business Class day seat might accommodate four daytime travellers, it becomes a single or dual bunk at night.
Business Class seating converted for nighttime use
Remarkably, the interiors have been configured so that open train carriage seating in the day can be turned into private lockable compartments at night. ‘Our understanding of how passengers move between different states, working, eating, socialising, resting, across a long journey has been central to how we have approached Day/Dream,’ says Kirsty Dias, managing director, PriestmanGoode. ‘Designing a space that performs equally well in two distinct operating modes, and transitions smoothly between them, draws on disciplines that are well established in aviation interior design: considered space planning, material performance under continuous operation, and a genuine understanding of passenger psychology at every phase of a journey.’
First Class bed
Rail concepts often require a hefty dose of utopian thinking, and while Day/Dream doesn’t require trackside infrastructural updates or major changes to rolling stock, it’s still very much a future vision of a more democratic and widely accessible approach to long-distance rail. With rail continuing to be the leader in the race to decarbonise the transport sector, maybe it really does make sense to dream.
Nighttime view of the onboard lounge