Show HN: Luna Rail – Treating night trains as a spatial optimization problem

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?

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.

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).