Japan to launch invisible' trains

If anyone’s going to be dreaming up the outlandish trains of the future, it’s Japan. It’s already mastered the levitating bullet train, which has been ferrying its passengers across the country at speeds of up to 580 km/hour for the past two years, and now Seibu Railway Co. wants to build a train that’s virtually invisible to onlookers.

Designed by architect Kazuyo Sejima from the Japanese firm Sanaa, who recently received a Pritzker Prize — the Nobel Prize of architecture — the train won’t be completely invisible (obviously), but super-reflective. Basically, it blends into its surroundings by reflecting them off its pristine mirrored surfaces.

What makes this project a bit more promising than some of the ambitious things architects have been coming up with recently is the fact that the design can be applied to existing trains.

Seibu Railway Co. has given Sejima permission to redesign the exterior and interior of its Red Arrow express commuter train, to commemorate its 100th anniversary.

Expected to hit the tracks some time in 2018, the invisible express will cover over 178 km (111 miles) throughout Japan. “The limited express travels in a variety of different sceneries, from the mountains of Chichibu to the middle of Tokyo, and I thought it would be good if the train could gently co-exist with this variety of scenery,” Sejima told the press last week.

Unfortunately, not a whole lot has been made public about the forthcoming design — probably because you don’t tell the world about how to build a semi-invisible train before building one for yourself. But according to Dezeen magazine, its current exterior will be replaced with semi-transparent and mirrored panels, and its boxy shape moulded into a silver bullet. “An initial rendering shows a semi-reflective surface covering the exterior of the train — something which [Sejima] claimed had ‘never been seen before now’,” Dezeen reports.

— Source: www.sciencealert.com