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156 points ant6n | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.422s | source

Hi HN, I'm Anton, founder of Luna Rail.

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.

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eqvinox ◴[] No.44344842[source]
Hi! What's your perspective on the shortage of manufacturing capacity for night train rolling stock? Last I heard ÖBB can't build them fast enough for demand, and few other companies are able to actually produce these? Are you planning to build your own industrial manufacturing capability for this? And what about 2nd level suppliers?
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1. ant6n ◴[] No.44345085[source]
Yes, the bottle Beck for night trains is rolling stock.

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.

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2. eqvinox ◴[] No.44346237[source]
Interesting, Thanks! (and sad to hear about that shifting to railjets :/)