The Orient Express it might not be, but well loved and very useful it is. The sleeper train from Paris carries skiers and snowboarders overnight to a variety of great ski resorts. And the big advantage of travelling this way is that you get two extra days on the slopes – one at the beginning and one at the end.

These overnight services, which have run for more than 100 years, are in danger of being axed. The French Ministry of Transport has announced that unless it receives a viable offer from a train operator to continue running them, all but three will be terminated. As these trains serve destinations all over France, it isn’t just skiers or those living in the mountains that will suffer the loss. What’s more, these journeys can be made at a fraction of the pollution and carbon emissions of flying or driving, in addition to offering the many benefits of travelling to the Alps by rail.

A magical journey

Step on to one of the Alps-bound trains in Paris on a Friday night at 11pm, and it soon becomes clear why stopping them would be a tragedy. As the city’s scenery slips away, you can walk down the train corridor and pass couchette upon couchette filled with excited skiers who know they’re going to wake up at 7am the next morning, minutes from the slopes.

Arrive refreshed and ready to hit the slopes Credit: Daniel Elkan

For children, this train adventure makes it feel like Christmas Eve, such is the level of excitement. To think that these magical journeys could end fills me, as both a skier and founder of rail-ski information website snowcarbon.co.uk, with sadness – so I’m not going to take it lying down. I've set up a petition to save the sleeper trains.

Under threat

The French State Department of Transport, which owns the national French rail carrier SNCF, has stated that unless a proposal to save the service is received from a train company by July 1 2016, these trains will be discontinued. The department claims that the sleepers, which mostly run every night, require a hefty subsidy of €100 per passenger journey. But rail experts disagree, arguing that the subsidy figures are mostly for fixed track costs, not for the running of the trains.

“It’s a fiction,” says Mark Smith, founder of rail-travel guide Seat 61. “If these trains are discontinued the industry as a whole doesn’t escape the track charges. These are non-escapable costs and shouldn’t really be included as a cost for running the train. The track access costs for signalling, maintenance and staff remain exactly the same in total, so there isn’t actually going to be any saving.”

And it’s not as if the trains are particularly expensive to run. “These overnight trains are owned by SNCF,” Smith says. “They have a few more years' life in them yet, because they’re only used at relatively low speeds once a day. So really, all you need to do is to put a locomotive on the front and pay for a driver and conductor, the bed linen and cleaning, and you’re on your way. Plus, these trains are popular and run well-filled, certainly on the busier nights of the week.”

Taking the sleeper train to the Alps gives you two extra days on the slopes Credit: Daniel Elkan

Marketing malfunction

What’s more frustrating is that the French government says that the trains are not as popular as they used to be, when in fact they are badly marketed by the train companies. British skiers, who can connect with these trains easily from the UK by taking a Eurostar to Paris, have trouble finding out about them, and seats are also frequently put on sale later than they're supposed to be. Plus ski tour operators are all but prevented from promoting them because of the lack of a simple ticketing system that would allow them to create an overnight rail-ski package with these trains.

For skiers, the loss of the Paris to Bourg St Maurice and Paris to St Gervais routes would mean that more than 20 top-class ski resorts – including Les Gets, Megève, Morzine, Avoriaz, Flaine, Méribel, Courchevel, La Plagne, Tignes and Val d’Isère – can no longer be reached by sleeper train. At a stroke, these routes will go from having a nightly sleeper service to none at all.

A four-berth couchette on the sleeper train Credit: Daniel Elkan

“Over the years, SNCF has done down these services,” says David Briginshaw, editor-in-chief at International Railway Journal. “Now the trains only have six- and four-berth couchette cars and no two-person sleeping cars with en-suite facilities. They’ve lost a lot of their higher-paying passengers, cutting themselves out of a part of the market, so they’ve shot themselves in the foot. It’s as if SNCF is just not interested in these overnight trains.”

The loss for travellers would be huge, Briginshaw says. “One of the advantages of the overnight trains is that you can get to a destination far earlier in the morning than you could any other way, and you don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn to do so.”

Sign the petition

I’ve booked these trains for groups of friends going skiing many times. And though fitting six people into a couchette car is a little cramped, it’s fun and feels like real travel – and is infinitely more comfortable than taking the direct overnight Eurostar Ski Train from St Pancras, which has seats but no flat beds. Over the years we’ve had such good times travelling this way, and many memorable days on quiet Saturday slopes because of it.

Help to save the sleeper train by signing the petition Credit: Daniel Elkan

These important overnight services can’t be quietly axed without a fuss. I’ve started a petition to enable people to show that they care about these services – and to make the French Government and SNCF think again. To show what people are losing, we made the film above in which teddy bears go to the slopes by overnight train – and even ski!

Collective action might just make the train operators see sense. The petition on Change.org has been jointly initiated by Snowcarbon, Loco2, Seat61, Back on Track and Futerra – and is supported by many other organisations and destinations. So please join me in signing and sharing the petition – to keep the journey part of the holiday, and get the future of transport back on track.