“Go Railways, Go Green!”
Railway Berth Number Lamp
The existing berth light inside coaches of Indian Railways is crude and the signage is cumbersome to read. Moreover, the fixture uses fluorescent tubes. The idea behind this project was to design and develop a modular and compact fixture on the existing footprint, using LED technology.
When I got this brief, I was personally excited. From my college days I used to travel by train in sleeper class and take the upper berth, in order to avoid disturbance. My idea of train travel was to read, listen to music or simply sleep. I always found it disturbing and irritating to see the lighting fixture, in terms of styling as well as quality of light.
The project started with understanding the existing fixture and its technical specifications. Indian Railway authorities were not interested to change the base plate screw positions, so we had to design within this constraint. We tested 3 pieces of 1 watt LED & tried different color combinations of warm & blue color LED. High power LEDs generate considerable heat, hence we used an aluminum base plate with optimized surface area as heat sink. The challenge was to make it look sleek & compact taking care of visual ergonomics. The current graphics were dimensionally constrained, so we proposed better layouts for the same.
Based on the selected graphics we developed styling for the product. We came up with concepts keeping simplicity in mind and using minimal design elements.
Initially we proposed a kind of modular Polycarbonate fixture with clear PMMA detachable number plate.
A big advantage of this design was that the same berth number light could be used for other purposes at the same time. However, the client wanted to stick to conventional sticker numbering, probably because of security and durability issues with the detachable number plate.
We developed prototypes and installed them in running coaches for testing.
The feed back from travelers was encouraging, they are looking forward to more green (sustainable) designs of railway coaches.
“The furnishing, lighting, window style is really good and 100 times better than the AC 2 tier, I travelled before 14 days, in Utkal Express from HWR. The look of the coach is really appreciable. Next time I definitely prefer to travel in same coach.”
— Pawan Khurana (traveller in prototype installed coach)
Go railways, Go green !!! ( YouTube Video )
I hope Indian Railways understands the need for green design and implements the same into their coaches in a big way. “Go railways, go green!”
Amarjeet Sonkar
November 20th, 2009 at 5:55 am
truly end to end design solution man! congrats.