| ▲ | ant6n 4 days ago |
| 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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| ▲ | Freak_NL 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Sleeper trains are held back by flying getting subsidised heavily by not having kerosene taxed, and national governments giving airports effectively unlimited room to grow; happily externalising the environmental cost. Why take a train if you can fly for a fraction of the cost? 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. |
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| ▲ | gruez 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Sleeper trains are held back by flying getting subsidised heavily by not having kerosene taxed 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? | |
| ▲ | ant6n 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You start off by essentially claiming the unit economics of night trains being too poor compared to aviation is the largest hurdle, then finish off by claiming that unit economics are not that major issue. 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. | | |
| ▲ | Freak_NL 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've listed four major causes. These are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. 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. |
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| ▲ | bluGill 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You missed a couple other points against night trains. 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- | | |
| ▲ | matt-p 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | No they don't. You use the same hub to hub model as airlines. E.g London to Edinburgh, not London to Edinburgh stopping in 4 places. 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. | | |
| ▲ | Freak_NL 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yup. These two points are not an issue at all, and are in fact strengths for sleeper trains. Being able to redirect a sleeper train without any (or minimal) impact on its timetable is a big plus. 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. | |
| ▲ | bluGill 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hub to hub - does that mean you wake everyone at 3am to change trains? Nobody switches cars with humans in them. | | |
| ▲ | Freak_NL 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Nobody switches cars with humans in them. 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. |
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| ▲ | eqvinox 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | ant6n 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | eqvinox 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Interesting, Thanks! (and sad to hear about that shifting to railjets :/) |
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| ▲ | raybb 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I gotta say I love this? Are you in contact at all with the folks advocating for more night trains across the EU https://back-on-track.eu/ ? Seems like it could be pretty mission aligned. 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/ |
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| ▲ | ant6n 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, we’re connected with back on track! I’m a day-one member of the German branch. A bunch of their members came and participated in our tests. We’re participating in their night train conference in September in Berlin, probably bringing a physical prototype. |
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| ▲ | MrJohz 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How do you plan to handle groups or families with this system? Having larger compartments gives a lot of flexibility and allows families or groups to travel together easily and spend the time with each other. The hotel pods look like they only go up to two people in size, and the seats are very isolated from each other, not even allowing people to sit next to each other as far as I can see. I'm excited to see more work being done to improve night train travel though! |
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| ▲ | ant6n 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | We’re working on standard railcars, which can be running together with traditional couchettes railcars. I would argue that group travel is largely a „solved“ problem, using couchettes (railcars with cabins having 4-6 beds). For couples, the smaller pods actually kind of „face“ each other across the aisles. |
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| ▲ | fyrn_ 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Really cool concept.
I wish we could have something like this in the US one day. 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. |
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| ▲ | bruce511 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| When traveling I often consider trains, and especially overnight trains. It's by far the most comfortable way to travel. Innovation in this space is a good thing. 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. |
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| ▲ | ant6n 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | We considered connecting pods. The orientation „behind“ each other makes interaction difficult. 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. |
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| ▲ | PaulRobinson 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Great work so far, but I note you are looking at a custom double-decker railcar with what looks like a very large loading gauge. My understanding is that for most of Europe, double deckers are not used due to loading gauge limits imposed by tunnels, bridges and so on. I presume your planned routes take that into account? Is that one of the reasons your mocked journey planner app doesn’t include the UK? |
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| ▲ | matt-p 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The UK has adequate loading gauge for double deckers on HS1/Chunnel and HS2 (though I'm not sure if the Euston extension will support it or not). 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. | |
| ▲ | herbst 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We have them in Switzerland. Often had to change train at the border and never thought it could be a technical limitation. | |
| ▲ | ant6n 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The „current“ concept is for refurbished standard passenger coaches, which is compatible everywhere in Europe except UK. The „long term“ concept is built around to be compatible with profiles UIC GB and G2, which work in most of Europe. | | |
| ▲ | matt-p 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | We have sleeper trains in the UK, it would obviously be great if they were cheaper but honestly there's not that much demand for travel from London - Scotland or Penzance in general. This is exacerbated by the fact a daytime train is easily doable so it's a bit of weird, niche product. 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. | | |
| ▲ | ant6n 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can run London to Europe via HS1 and tunnel, but the operating costs are insane. Anybody who propose that would get shut down by the „rail bubble“ extremely hard (like midnight trains did a couple years back). I think it would be nice, but it’s far off. 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. | | |
| ▲ | matt-p 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | This was true a few years ago, but today the regulatory environment is very positive for these kind of services. You will see many non-eurostar open access operators on those tracks within the next year or two. I wouldn't massively bother with intra-uk yet, I agree wholeheartedly. |
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