Touchscreen monitors will be one of the highlights of the RegioJet trains.
BRATISLAVA. Jozef Hostin, owner of MOLPIR company in Bratislava tensely expects 14th of December. Hundreds of Slovak passengers travelling from Košice to Bratislava and back will start touching his products. MOLPIR company equipped yellow RegioJet carriages with monitors, which are planned to have three trains per day on this route.
"We have worked for two years on this project. We had to deal not only with fulfilling of safety standards, but also with the issue that monitors will match the interior," says Hostin. Touchscreen monitors, where passenger can watch movies or tv shows are ought to become one of the highlights of the train. "We have the first train in Europe with monitors built in seats," says owner of RegioJet Radim Jančura.
Little known company was established in Bratislava 20 years ago. At the beginning it was focused on installation of airconditioning for older cars, later added electrotechnics. Few years ago started to cooperate with Taiwanese computer producer Micro-Star International. Slovak technicians were supposed to come up with an idea how to build monitors into buses. "We delivered our solution for Mr.Jančura´s yellow buses . That is how our partnership was born," says Hostin.
The railway became the biggest challenge for a company that employs 40 people in Slovakia. "Safety standards for railway are much more strict than standards for road transport. Monitor has to be made from fireproof material and need to make sure that it will not get under high voltage in case of an accident," says Hostin.
Company then revised the Taiwanese monitor, equipped it with protective cover and new cabling. "We cooperated with seat producers and designers how to modify the monitor, so it would suit perfectly," explains Hostin.
Supply and installation of monitor for each of the sixty seats in RegioJet carriage costs cca 1000 euro. Czech operator promises that they will buy eighty of these carriages in the near future. The director of MOLPIR hopes that this is just a beginning. "If this innovation will be successfull in the trains, it is only a mater of time when more of operators will go the same way," says Hostin.
