KiwiRail’s new Scenic carriages win design award

KiwiRail’s new Scenic carriages win design award

Scenic’s new AK passenger carriages have taken a Silver Award in the Best Product Design in the 2013 New Zealand Design Awards run by the Designers Institute of New Zealand.

“The award is the culmination of a four year partnership between Barnacle Design and KiwiRail Scenic and confirms the outstanding quality of our new AK passenger cars,” says KiwiRail’s General Manager, Passenger, Deborah Hume.

“We’ve positioned Scenic at the top end of the travel and conference market and this award underscores that. It shows that our product is spot on in terms of both comfort and styling. We owe a huge vote of thanks to Barnacle Design, the KiwiRail engineering design team and supporting engineering contractors. They’ve done a superb job,” Ms Hume says.

KiwiRail Scenic was up against some pretty tough competition, including products from companies with an international reputation for design. The new AK passenger carriages were amongst nine finalists in the spatial design category and 11 in the product category out of a total of 777 entries.

Barnacle Design’s Creative Director, Keith Strode-Penny, says that KiwiRail did remarkably well to make the finals of both the spatial design and the product category with such a complex product as a rail passenger car.

“Compared with the other entries KiwiRail’s was a fundamentally more complex product. It also wasn’t just the work of a design team. The design involved engineers concerned with the mechanical functions of the passenger car. These hard engineering elements then had to be incorporated into a functional but elegant design. That’s no mean achievement. It’s also a blend of engineering design that is outside the usual range of entries the judges are familiar with. That makes getting the Silver Award even more amazing as we really were breaking new ground,” says Mr Strode-Penny.

ENDS

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