Last year, The New York Times reported on a disturbing development in the world of rail travel: due to budget cuts, night trails that criss-crossed Europe were coming to a (hopefully temporary) end. An editorial published in The Guardian earlier this year sounded the alarm about this budgetary shift, noting that plenty of demand existed for such trains: “the evidence consistently shows that the European public would back an expanded, affordable and modernised network.”
Assuming overnight train travel makes a comeback before long, what will the night trains of the future look like? Based on the work being done by the German company Luna Rail, the answer involves a cross between a business class international cabin and a room in a particularly well-designed capsule hotel.
The company has been busy both testing different cabin designs and showing off their work on social media, both of which seem designed to endear them to admirers of transit systems and elegant design. As LunaRail founder Anton Dubrauhe told DW‘s Katharina Schantz, part of the appeal of his company’s concepts is that they can be adapted to existing train cabins, with dozens of the company’s pods fitting into a single train car.
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Norway has a plan for thatDubrau told DW that his hope is to have LunaRail compartments in place by 2030. “We want to offer prices similar to air travel, but still offer enough comfort so that people are willing to switch to the train,” he said. Based on the videos and images that the company has shared thus far, the combination of design and privacy is certainly appealing — but there’s still a long way to go before these designs become a ubiquitous sight on the continent’s railways.
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