The incredibly Danish design of Denmark’s new national trains | Hacker News Reader

The incredibly Danish design of Denmark’s new national trains

fastcompany.com

17 pointsrustoo12 comments

>Torpe says these elements make the train highly representative of the country. He estimates the studio spent more than 15,000 hours on the design. “We went all the way into these details to create the Danish train,”

I duuno mate, maybe my monitor calibration is way off but to me, the renderings make it look pretty dull and depressing inside considering all the effort he gloats about and what Danish weather is usually like. Like some cheap IKEA furniture using Quake's color pallete. Austrian and Swiss trains look much nicer and cheerfull than that on the inside.

Many of the renderings are supposed to show how it’ll look when it’s dark outside the train, since the whole winter, that’s what it’ll be when people are taking the train from/to work.

Denmark only has 8-ish hours of daylight in the winter, mostly co-located with the working hours, so it makes a lot of sense to focus on how the experience will be then. And they’re trying to go for “warm and cozy”. Looks good to me at least.

When it’s bright outside the inside lighting goes brighter and cooler.

But that doesn't change the drab colored interior that's irrespective of the lighting.

Yeah looking at the photo and reading the 15k hours in design makes me a little suspicious that the designer wasn’t working very effectively.

The final design looks not better than other high doors trains in Europe. Designer should have just copied one of the existing designs and saves themselves 14999 hours.

Here is the Spanish high speed train, put in service in 1992 (30 years ago!), from my untrained eye they look comparable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renfe_Class_100

No first class. That’s great, especially since nowadays it just means an extra 8cm legroom, different color seats and a bit more quiet due to low occupancy. Instead I imagine the trains and schedule are designed to comfortably serve actual demand. Hope this trend continues around the world.

Are these just 3d renderings? If concept trains are anything like concept cars, it'll be more useful to look at the final physical product

I’m not sure in general, but I had a similar thought ~5 years ago when the new London Underground tube stock design was unveiled in the form of concept art. A few months ago they did their first press session with the actual trains, and to a layman’s eye, it’s basically exactly what was in the concept art. I’m sure there are differences for commercialisation and operational details, but I can’t notice them.

Concept cars are about the concept and not intended to become a real car for general availability. Whereas projects like this are typically fairly directly tied to an actual project to replace the rolling stock or a contract with a manufacturer. They may still be a little aspirational and need the details working out, but I think they tend to be much closer to reality.

The overall thing? Not sure. But the seats are definitely real and aren’t just 3d-rendered, as one of the images in the article is an actual photo of those chairs in one of their facilities (i.e., outside of a train).

FTA: "A final version of the design was released in 2021, and production is now underway."

It's a rendering that represents the file design. Train sets have long lead times.

IC5 is not the fifth generation of intercity trains. It just has 5 carriages in a train set.

IC3 was the first generation of this kind of trains, having 3 carriages in a train set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSB_Class_MF

Both IC4 and IC2 came after IC3.

Bah, always that stupid plane-style seating layout... I really wish more railway companies did 2x2 like the Swiss. That aside, it looks cozy.

There's both types of seat arrangements

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