A city’s architecture is perhaps the richest description of its culture, and the public transport is a predominant factor in creation of the outlook of every city.
Darina Shirchenko, an industrial designer from Russia, has designed an electric tram that complements the architecture of European cities. The e-trams are a not just a means of transport, but they are one of the city’s most important features. The tram was designed with a philosophy that the public transport should be a moving element of a city’s architectural environment.
The architectural heritage of the European cities appears in the train’s exterior. Shirchenko observed that the dominant architectural genre in major European capitals and cities is a gothic style. The designer picks structural elements like pointed arches, archivolts, buttresses, spires, and pinnacles and incorporates them in the tram design. The shell of the tram is made from dark wood and tinted glass while the handrails are made of antimicrobial copper.
The concept e-tram uses a combination of horizontal and vertical bogies, which solves the problem of disjointed tram cars. This concept also supports the transition between carriages, thus providing more stable and comfortable places for the passengers to stand. The wooden interior of the tram represents the history of the major European port cities. The designed tram would run with an efficiency three times to that of a bus and would carry up to 250 people.
The tram uses the same concept of Siemens ULF (ultra low floor) tram, in which the entrance height is low, and there is no platform. The horizontal bogies employ pivot wheel in the first and the last partitions, while the vertical bogies use them between the interior partitions that level out the floor of the tram, thus making the ride smoother.
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