I've always thought night trains are a fantastic, sustainable alternative to short-haul flights, but they're often held back by a lack of privacy, comfort, and poor economics due to low passenger capacity.
I became overly fascinated with this puzzle. I view it as a kind of night train Tetris (my wife less charitably calls it "sardinology"). I spent way too much time learning about and sketching various layouts, trying to figure out how to fit the maximum number of private cabins into a standard railcar, while making them attractive for both day and night travel.
This eventually led to a physical workshop (in Berlin) and a hands-on rapid prototyping process. We've built a series of full-scale mockups, starting with wood and cardboard and progressing to high-fidelity versions with 3D-printed and CNC-milled parts, with various functional elements.
Hundreds of people have come in to test our various iterations, because you can't test ergonomics or comfort by looking at renderings (although we did create a bunch of nice ones).
The link goes to our home page showing our approach and some of the thinking behind them. It’s been a lot of fun working on this puzzle, and we're excited to share what we've come up with. We hope you think it's cool too and would love to hear your thoughts.
Also, interesting to see just after the launch of https://noxmobility.com/ which is targeting the same market.
Wanted to report a small typo, In the 3D model index menu, "Uppder" can be found. I assume this was supposed to read "Upper", as in "above".
I hope to one day ride such a system when I visit europe, best of luck with your project.
In places with good train travel, it seems like they already have several cabin classes, from sardine seats (still luxurious compared to air travel) to private cabins (at several multipliers of price). Pod style rooms would presumably be cheaper than that, but still a lot more expensive than a seat?
Then in places without high speed passenger rail, like the US, this wouldn't really be able to address the major problems with train travel (slowness, lower priority than freight, low reliability, etc.).
Under what scenarios would using pods instead of cabins be more economically viable? And could these be retrofitted into existing sleeper cars, or would they have to build entirely new trains?
If they are comfortable you could rent out the cabins when not in use either fitted on the train or not. You could also retire the units there.
You could make a platform only and make it easy for others to design modules in a broad price range. Maybe most modules should be in storage until booked.
You could park the "hotel" module on the destination and put it back on the train for the return trip.
* night only
* 40 pods per car
* implemented
* day and night
* 65 pods or 40 single rooms
* in physical since 2023
* team focused on technical development and testing
* day and night
* virtual concept
* team very strong on marketingThe 15g is a good estimate, see discussion here: https://back-on-track.eu/de/klimawirkung-von-nachtzuegen-neu...
While I'm aware that feature creepy is the enemy here, I would suggest a way to "combine " two pods for those traveling as a couple. If I'm traveling with my wife we don't want to be in "separate pods".
A retractable "wall" between 2 pods would be fine. It doesn't have to be elaborate, but you wanna point to something outside and say 'look at that' etc.
We got 65 private pods or close to 40 little single cabins - in a refurbished railcar. In a new car it would be more.
We put together some explanation of the economics and the difference between old and new cars: https://luna-rail.com/approach
Btw I run a weekly newsletter about urbanism and while your trains may not be exactly related I think it's cool enough that we'll feature it in the upcoming week! https://urbanismnow.substack.com/
For example a "night train" maxes out around 12 hours. A train from 6pm to 6am is functionally equivalent to a 8pm flight, arriving at midnight, checking into a hotel, getting some sleep etc.
How far you can go in that 12 hours (give or take) depends on the speed of the train etc. In Europe you can go to a lot of places in 12 hours. In the US not so much.
Much longer and other factors come into play. You have to balance the time cost of "getting there" to the time benefit of "being there".
But thats OK. This solution doesn't have to work everywhere. It can start where it works well and grows from there.
But in a sense, night trains are already like that. Since they can stop at multiple places, you can depart and arrive downtown. In the meantime you’re in your cabin and forget everything.
Entering the train „with“ the pod instead of just yourself is gonna make boarding and alighting take forever, and the logistics of storing and moving the pods are a nightmare. It’s going to reduce capacity by a lot because you cannot optimize the layout and every pod needs to be „insertable“ as a whole. (3x reduction in capacity means 3x increase in ticket cost).
Homologation is going to be a nightmare - in Europe, realistically, it’s gonna take more than 10 years or develop something like that. You need a new infrastructure because right now stations are for people - that’ll probably take 20 years (in Europe).
We’re participating in their night train conference in September in Berlin, probably bringing a physical prototype.
The lengths I will go through to avoid air travel is much higher than a 1:1 ratio in comparable time. When I have to get the cattle treatment I prefer cattle cars over cattle cans.
And even with 1:1 remember that layovers are a completely different beast. If Münich was a hub between Northern an southern Europe I would be happy to spend a well rested day before continuing on. Especially in spargel season!
...but only a fool does not fear German railroads. They could really learn from the Austrians.
The reason night trains are not a thing is because there is no real network. Looking for tickets in Europe it is often once or twice a week departures on specific routes. No real good north south interconnected corridor from Scandinavia.
And as a proper geek I have even sought them out but often found them sold out.
They cost optimized themselves to obliteration.
The „long term“ concept is built around to be compatible with profiles UIC GB and G2, which work in most of Europe.
Ideally, we end up with a big enough network of sleeper lines that it makes sense for ÖBB, European Sleeper, or whichever operator to have the luxury of taking some wagons out for maintenance and standby, and even scale up and down depending on the season.
The new ÖBB wagons seem much more practical (and currently exist). A normal sleeper train wagon with stacked beds in compartments is fine for me. This origami concept looks claustrophobic, and the sleeping positions seem to allow for no room for the normal movements you make in your sleep, let alone getting out to take a piss or something.
They way this issue was „resolved“ more less naturally during testing is that the pods all have The same orientation, so pods across the aisle approximately face each other. In our lab we had two iterations of the pods set up to face each other, and tester and testee interacted quite naturally —- once we set up our test rig like that, the questions „what about couples“ reduced a lot, most understood the vis-a-vis intuitively.
Our bigger cabins have two ppl versions, but a lot (if not most) travel is individua anyway, especially if night trains will be used for work travel.
Trains in general are held back by governments not investing in rail infrastructure, because the pork barrel of another motorway link is so hard to resist (and we're not properly maintaining these either).
Sleeper trains are held back, because cross-boundary collaboration between the various semi-national rail companies is tough (for Europe).
Sleeper trains are held back, because there is a lack of modern rolling stock. Not completely new concepts; just up-to-date sleeper wagons (the ÖBB has the leading edge here now with their new wagons).
There is room for improvement in the wagon designs, but it is almost irrelevant in the face of the other challenges.
The plan is to initially target refurbished standard passenger couches. We have a large research and development consortium to develop the technology and adaptation of coaches.
The refurb itself can be done by many companies, we don’t need a large supplier like Siemens.
As for the ÖBB nightjet, there’s talk about shifting the last ordered nightjet to rail jets (for day travel). Speculation is that the low capacity of the Trainsets result in poor unit economics.
Our perspective is that with much improved unit economics, the problem overall becomes much more easily solvable. You can compete with aviation on price. You can pay for prioritized track access. You can operate trains privately without direct involvement of national operators.
Finally, the refurb approach skirts the rolling stock bottle neck.
In the larger pods, there’s actually an uptick in evaluation for taller people. Testers were often surprised how well it works.
All beds have at lest 2m, although there are different degrees of becoming smaller at the foot end — just like in aviation business class (with ticket prices 1.5 orders of magnitudes higher).
You can't compete with aviation on price currently. Not while its environmental costs are graciously overlooked and left out of the ticket price. This is a political problem.
Comfort, reliability, sustainability, elegance, ease-of-use: those are the major selling points for night rail travel done right. This includes legroom, luggage space, and the ability to move around outside of your seat and to toss and turn in bed¹ — something current generation sleeper trains provide. If your goal is to cram as many people as possible in every metre of train length, you are optimising the wrong parameter at the wrong time.
1: The coffin beds in these hotel pods are clever from a space filling perspective, but I fear I would be nastily banging my knees several times in the course of the night, and that's ignoring the fact that sleeping that low close to the rails is just not pleasant.
first trains work best if they stop many times - how will you wake people up at 3am for their stop? For that matter who would agree to that? Without that churn many destinations are not in range.
second, track needs maintenance. If the track is running at night as well when will you repair it? I makes sense to just close nost track every night for repairs. For busy two rail sections you can close on track and run very reduced service on the other - but this reduction means you don't want people sleeping as you can fill your trains just on people working night shifts.
all of the above are challenges. They can be worked around in various ways however they to be considered to see if it is worth it-
One of the nice things about traveling at night is you have less time pressure and congestion so when doing track repairs it's usually fine to divert the train.
I'm excited to see more work being done to improve night train travel though!
We can run London - Europe double decker today and if we connected HS2 to HS1 it would probably be possible to run from Birmingham, Crewe and Manchester to continental Europe too.
However the amount of demand there'd be for an overnight train from (let's just say) London to Barcelona at £99 each way would be immense.
As for intra-UK sleeper: yes there are some possible routes, but the market is small. Developing custom trains for that would be very expensive. And the concepts we propose don’t work well cut the profile is so small.
I wouldn't massively bother with intra-uk yet, I agree wholeheartedly.
Usually they depart from the last boarding station around midnight, and the first disembarking station won't be hit until six in the morning. Some outliers exist, but the number of people getting on or off there is negligible. For most travellers you are in the train before 22:00, and won't leave before 6:00.
This ÖBB line is typical: https://www.nightjet.com/de/reiseziele/oesterreich/wien
Yes, you can get off in Nürnberg at 4:08. But almost no one does that. The train just happens to have a halt there¹, but 95% of the passengers get on in the Netherlands and the Ruhr Area, and won't get off until Austria (and vice versa).
1: I suspect mostly for rail topological reasons.
For couples, the smaller pods actually kind of „face“ each other across the aisles.
That’s basically what we’re doing, since the capacity approaches that of day trains, the ticket costs should be similar.
> …in exchange for having the ability to run the train slow.
The railcars can go 200km/h. It’s not super high speed, but pretty competitive in Germany at least.
Is whatever fuel trains use taxed? If not, I don't see how this is relevant.
>and national governments giving airports effectively unlimited room to grow
Which countries are those? For instance in UK they wanted to expand Heathrow since as early as 2006, yet due to various government shenanigans isn't due to complete until 2040, assuming it doesn't get backtracked again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport
Moreover since you're comparing against trains, don't trains need land as well, for the tracks and stations? Why do trains seemingly get a free pass from you on that?
>Trains in general are held back by governments not investing in rail infrastructure, because the pork barrel of another motorway link is so hard to resist (and we're not properly maintaining these either).
What makes motorways more of a "pork barrel" than train tracks?
What do you mean? Changing the train consist during the trip? That is exactly what they can do.
Hamburg/Amsterdam on one end, Innsbruck/Wien on the other. Those wagons get shuffled about like a deck of cards en route! So in Amsterdam there is one train with wagons marked Wien and wagons marked Innsbruck. You get in the right numbered wagon, and end up where you want. In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere (actually, probably München) they turn two trains into two different trains.
Most people never notice.
So far we've been very much doing the second. Built it, experiment on it, test it, make sure it works. Only publish what's actually feasible. Set up more projects to make sure all the kinks will be worked out. Work together with experts to ensure proper ventilation, noise and vibration control, etc. etc.
But as a startup, this process can be frustratingly slow. I am concerned investors may want to see quick results, not perfected solutions.
For those interested, this is a good bbc podcast episode digging in to the economics of train travel including sleeper trains
I assume the implication here is that with more granular swap-outs, you might get more regular maintenance of those minor issues?
While I agree it's a problem and could be improved, I don't find train maintenance any worse than hotel maintenance in general – most hotel rooms aren't in perfect condition and they arguably don't have the same restrictions.
It’s definitely easier to get into than the öbb mini cabins, because the relative orientation of steps and entrance are better.
As another tall person here, the length of the matress/bed is not as critical as what comes when the bed ends. 2m matresses with a wall/bedend that is massive is way more umfortable for a tall person then a 1,9m matress with 20cm of air behind it.
>just like in aviation business class
Yeah but im not flying lay-down business class when i want to go Hamburg-Vienna because the trip is only 90mins. I fly lay-down business when going trans-atlantic or to asia.
I think once our railcars actually operate, it would be a good idea to show something like this - especially since it allows showcasing that the seat is basically bigger than a first class seat (almost 60cm wide vs 45cm). But the dimensions keep changing around, so we don't want to make false promises for the exact dimensions.
But the goal is that all beds at least have 2m length, even if narrow at the end.
I can see the appeal for young people who want to stay in hostels to save money, but honestly I prefer to drive or take a plane. Money here is not the problem.
The Sydney to Melbourne air corridor is one of the busiest in the world [0], and yet anyone who has taken the train journey has told me to never, ever take it due to how horrible it is. Complaints include lack of ammenities, comfort, aggressive passengers (fights and yelling etc). I'm tempted to try it just to experience it.
Surely, surely we can do better than that. I'd love to hop on at Central at 8pm, have a hot dinner, relax and wake up at Melbourne around 6am with a hot shower and breakfast.
[0] I'm sure there's better sources but I could only find https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/the-world-s-bus...
Here in Australia, we're lucky enough to have incredibly cheap solar during the day. But iirc, our energy is even dirtier (in most non-SA/Tasmanian states) during the night due to the use of brown coal.
Lemme explain. I see no (lockable) doors.
Which means I wouldn't want to let my gadgets and other luggage out there in the open, when having to use the bathroom, or maybe going into the (snack)bar, if there is one.
Which means having to carry my backpack/suitcase around with me, which is annoying.
Which also opens the questions of other commonly encountered annoyances.
Dirty bathrooms/toilets.
What level of service is to be expected, regarding this?
A) A hub further south than Berlin. If Dresden (end station for the line) was a "hub" then OK B) Hard to find and find intercomnnectimg routes. C) It departures from Copenhagen South not Copenhagen Central. D) Poor availability. You need to book in advance if you're not very flexible on dates. This compounds when you need to interconnected. E) Insane prices. They have optimized themselves out of business. CPH - Berlin in a private cabin for 2 will cost around USD $500. This much more expensive than plane tickets and a very nice hotel room.
If you talk with "regular" people this does not even register as an option. Hence a poor network is not comparable to a proper network. It needs to be able to compete - not on all parameters but at least some.