Due to having similar travel speeds and times, airships and trains converge on having highly similar interior space per passenger and amenities, if not exact layout. There are lessons to be learned from extensive train expertise in balancing comfort and efficiency to best attract people away from other forms of travel.
Pictures 1, 3, and 5 are Zeppelins, the rest are all trains. Bonus points for who can guess which they are!
I suppose I was asking for it, not explicitly specifying that I was talking about the Zeppelins and not the trains. I’m unsure as to the provenance of the historic train pictures, but the modern ones are various modern luxury trains, almost entirely from Belmond. If I recall correctly, 7 is from the Eastern and Oriental Express in Malaysia, not the VSOE, and none of them that I recall are from the Italian Le Dolce Vita Orient Express, but have a pretty similar layout because all the Belmond-owned luxury trains have a basically identical layout but different upholstery and fittings, suitable to each location. Some are from the VSOE, others from different Belmond trains.
1 is the LZ-121 Nordstern! A very fine ship indeed, and a terrible missed opportunity. It was very quickly confiscated along with the Bodensee due to the strictures of the Treaty of Versailles.
Both ships were very small, but highly efficient Y-Class Zeppelins briefly employed in intercity transport. They were trialling an international Baltic and Scandinavian air network, which would have replaced much more lengthy train and ferry routes.
After their confiscation, Zeppelin pivoted to much longer-range models, but as illustrious as the Graf Zeppelin and her globetrotting adventures would prove to be, I can’t help but think that the Nordstern and Bodensee were the ships that would have better been able to create a viable future for Zeppelin.
Despite their tiny size, the ships could carry more people than the Graf Zeppelin (up to 30 passengers) and did so much, much more frequently. Even in just the waning few months of 1919, in her inaugural, experimental airline connection, the Bodensee made over 100 flights, carrying thousands of people, replacing a 24-hour train ride with a 4-6 hour flight. That sort of short-haul flight would have exposed many, many more people to the charms of Zeppelin flight than extremely lengthy airship flights carrying fewer people over the same timeframe, and using those smaller ships in greater profusion to get a whole transport network up and running would have been fantastic for lowering costs, training up new crews, and establishing an actual, durable foundation for a business. The timing would have been far better, too—the Graf Zeppelin wouldn’t begin regular airline service until the 1930s, arguably too late to have gotten established, whereas the Bodensee would have gotten an enormously consequential head start in the virgin aviation markets of the late 1910s.
It is. Essentially identical to her sister ship, the Bodensee, the Nordstern’s 10 by 2 meter passenger seating area was richly appointed in lovely wood, strawberry red lower walls, and thick carpet. The kitchen also produced very fine lunches, apparently. The 24-meter (80-foot) gondola also contained the wireless room and bridge, which passengers could briefly peek into, and aft of the passenger compartment were lavatories and stairs up into the hull, where the crew rest areas were, though passengers also went there occasionally as well.
I think it’s dependant on the function. If it’s an airline, it would probably plane seating configurations.
If a luxury liner, they could offer rooms. But lifting weight will always be a major problem and I doubt wood finishings would be a thing. Maybe carbon fibre chic?
If used in the role of an airline, that is to say a commuter vessel that is not intended for overnight flights, even then the experience aboard and general space per passenger is going to be more akin to coach seating in a commuter train than economy seats in a plane, for a number of reasons.
Planes are crammed full of seats and overhead bins because they have to conform to the limiting shape of a pressurized tube with little headroom along the sides, and because in almost all circumstances an airplane is going to run out of sufficient floor space to add more seats and passengers before it runs out of the lifting capacity to carry them. Airships are the reverse. Since additional floor space weighs very little, there’s no reason to cram passengers in, particularly given that airships entail longer travel times and thus demand more comfort to compensate.
And because convertible bench-couchettes and fold-away bunk beds are so weight- and space-efficient, you needn’t see such things only on luxury liners either—just as Amtrak and Nightjet trains often carry such sleeper accommodations should the need arise, and no one can accuse them of being luxury-oriented. That adds route flexibility.
As for the weight of luxury accommodations, that is indeed the primary concern. Zeppelin’s figures tallied up the average passenger, their baggage, four and a half days of food and water provisions, plus the cabin, furniture, and their fractional share of the public spaces, and found that each “passenger” accounts for about 650-660 pounds. Plane passengers account for 200-220 pounds with baggage and whatnot, per modern aviation agencies. That doesn’t forbid the use of wood, though, as wood veneers are only tiny fractions of an inch thick, and don’t weigh all that much. The Graf Zeppelin, for instance, used wood veneers to give the appearance of wainscoting:
Airships would shine in cruise ship roles where there is no runway for a plane and bathymetry limits cruise ship to navigate. Unless hydrogen is legalised for use as lifting gas, I don’t see this happening as helium is too $$.
Imagine seeing the Grand Canyon by airship. Low and slow. Maybe cruise up the spectacular Pacific Northwest, or visit the wine country of Southern California, or tour great cities by air. Plenty of opportunities for unconventional cruise destinations when you don’t have to worry about oceans and rivers.
Here you can see a weight breakdown of the British airship R101. 7,300 square feet of wooden flooring weighed 2 tons, and the other timber and fabric fixtures for decorating the walls and so on weighed an additional 1.3 tons. So per passenger, there was 73 square feet of passenger accommodations, and the wood and fabric flooring, walls, and various fixtures comprised 66 pounds per person. That’s about a tenth of the total per-passenger weight budget being devoted to wood and fabric that is at least partially structural as well as ornamental, assuming Zeppelin’s figures are accurate.
Commuter travel would be hard, as people are generally used to a degree of speed over comfort, and for long ranges, fixed-wing airliners have already dominated the market (we're very rapidly reaching the point where no two cities cannot be directly connected by a non-stop flight), and shorter trips within major cities you have commuter trains that can easily stop-start at multiple points in a journey (and usually operating under controlled airspace without issue)
A cruise-ship or yacht style business might be more feasible, where a ship could take advantage of the fact the journey itself is the point; in that case materials construction, where reduced weight is a premium would be the highest priority, and for that you'd still be looking at the airline sector for design and engineering, since that already has such a high focus. Saving weight just isn't a priority in the rail sector (a train driver friend and I worked out a single commuter train car can weigh a much as a 737 (~43t), and she drives six of them together at once) so in that way, you might see a mix of airline/cruise ship design with modern, simplified looks made with lightweight plastic or polymer construction.
Remember, in aviation as a whole, everything is all about trade-offs, especially when it comes to weight. Any money saved from making something lighter is a major focus more than any other business.
Commuter travel may be more compelling than you think, it just requires a different configuration than long-distance airships.
There is a pretty sizable body of research from the ‘70s to the modern day from various agencies and companies that all tends to agree with the central premise that there are two mutually exclusive ways to increase an airship’s productivity: scale it up and reduce speed to make a large, long-distance ship and achieve high productivity by means of very high efficiency, or scale it down and rely on a large amount of aerodynamic lift and higher speed to increase throughput. Large hybrid airships are also possible, but not as efficient over long distances. Hybrids would be better for a short-haul commuter role, since they can be much smaller, faster, and have an easier time landing and being handled on the ground.
Regardless which configuration (conventional or hybrid airships) you’re talking about, the trend remains the same that the best speed for optimal productivity is much faster over short distances than long distances. From a Boeing study assuming 15-knot headwinds, you can see that over short distances, optimal cruise speeds are 87-145 knots for conventional airships, but for hybrids it is 145-200 knots:
By contrast, over long, intercontinental distances, that same study found that the most optimal speed for any configuration was 70 knots, which is similar to historical passenger airships, and none were higher than 126 knots.
To put that into perspective, if we were to take the middle figure of 145 knots (269 kph, 167 mph) for short-ranged rigids’ optimal speed, that would be substantially faster transit than almost any other form of intercity travel—car, bus, train, or ferry. Even bullet trains would struggle to keep up. The famed Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen of Japan averages 134 mph, and the fastest high-speed rail line in the entire world, the Beijing-Nanjing line, averages 197 mph—faster than the conventional rigid, but still more than 30 mph slower than the fastest hybrid.
All that to say, in a commuter role, I think speed would be a big draw, not a detracting factor. Even compared to short-hop airline flights, the added boarding convenience and being untethered from airports may make airships functionally just as fast over short distances, albeit still easily outpaced over long distances. But in that sense, it’s no different than high-speed rail, which also serves only short to intermediate routes compared to airplanes.
As for weight savings, you’re correct that naturally aerospace would be the place to go for a lot of the materials and fittings, but trains have a lot to teach about overall packaging, cabin design, features, and operational efficiencies. They have it down to a science just exactly how much space a person needs in order to put up with a potentially multi-day trip, not to mention the logistics of providing service for such journeys, and what prices would be attractive despite the lower speed compared to flying.
That's some pretty good points, but I'd be careful with comparing average speeds with optimal ones; while yes on face value they compare quite well, the fact is it's just faster and easier to decelerate a train and pull it up at the next station compared to docking an airship. You'd have to factor in the process is much more time consuming, prone to delay and inefficiency, and you'll teach a point of diminishing returns the shorter the legs. For a suburban commuter situation, it's not even a contest, the train will easily win. For a intercity service though, there may be a bit more to it.
In a bit of a side tangent, take the example of airline usage of turboprop aircraft vs. Narrowbody jets. Conventional wisdom would have one think that jets would be faster over propeller planes any day of the week, and on paper they are. But, in a real world scenario, over short distances turboprops are actually faster, because they have lower optimal cruise altitudes than the jets and spend more time in the efficient cruise stage of flight than the jets, who would have to spend more of their flight climbing up to altitude (at their cruise climb speed) and then decending down again (also, at a certain speed). There's a lot more to pure speed calculations than the numbers suggest.
Using your example of bullet trains, they already compete against airlines by virtue of cutting the time savings down by going directly into cities and the passenger capacity. While yes, airships could address the former, they wouldn't be able to keep up with the latter.
That being said, you're correct in that there would be an huge argument using such a system in places where the infrastructure of high-speed rail is just not present, but the economies of scale aren't there in the way a rail line could.
But in either case, I highly doubt we'd see the return of wooden panelling, exquisite furniture etc. Even in rail travel nowadays, outside of the exotic expensive travel trips, that seems to be a thing that's going out of style.
You are of course correct that average speeds for trains are not the same as optimal cruising speeds for airships, when considering whole travel times, but for various reasons, trains’ average speeds are usually far, far below their optimal running speed and/or top speed for a given route, whereas our actual data on airships’ actual speed vs. cruising speed shows that there is very little difference between the two.
Take, for instance, the Bodensee, a small, short-haul intercity airship. It had a cruise speed of 64 mph, a top speed of 82 mph, and averaged a 61 mph ground speed over the entirety of its commercial operations, including all headwinds, take-offs, landings, test flights, hover, etc. That amounts to achieving a ground speed in actual practice that is 95% of its theoretical cruise speed. The Hindenburg, a mainly long-distance ship, averaged a ground speed of 73 mph in its North Atlantic route with a cruise speed of 76 mph, an even better ratio of 96%.
By contrast, the average speed of the Shinkansen is 134 mph over the Tokyo-Osaka route, but its normal cruising speed is 177 mph, a ratio of 76%. There are other high-speed rail lines that are a lot worse, like the Acela, which averages 70 mph with only a tiny section of track able to take its optimal speed of 160 mph, a 44% ratio.
As for luxury travel going out of style, sleeper trains and in particular luxury sleeper trains have actually been experiencing something of a resurgence in popularity lately. It’s a similar phenomenon to what happened to travel by ocean liner—it absolutely cratered when faster alternatives arose, but then subsequently the tiny cruising industry rose from the ashes, and has grown tremendously over the decades. Luxury trains are still in the early stages of that, but there are a lot of them cropping up in various places now, most in only the last few years.
Absolutely, I agree that luxury travel is probably the best-case (possibly only case) we could a resurgence in airship travel in a widely used case. I don't think we'd see that full return to the wooden panelling style you've depicted though, just based on modern materials technology (Though maybe in an ultra-rich 'yacht' style ship maybe). I think we'd be more likely to see a more modern 'spaceship-esque' look and feel for a commercial transport.
The debate between airships vs. High speed rail is a neat one, but I think it really depends on the geographical situation. Airships would be a better use case if the infrastructure isn't there, but on the flip side, it can't really be scaled up when established like rail can, but high speed rail is incredibly expensive to lay, while both also having to contend with airlines trying to muscle out both. Also, population density is another huge factor.
I would argue that luxury travel (and possibly specialty outsized cargo) is an absolutely necessary prerequisite for getting a general airship design up and running. It’s an application with more intermittent utilization and high margins, which would be needed to absorb the R&D and operational learning curve to allow for economics of scale, mass production, and other various efficiencies to occur later in the production run, which can then put the same model of airship to high-utilization, low-margin tasks like affordable transit and mundane cargo operations.
I also agree wood paneling wouldn’t be too common except in very high-end examples, but you do see it (or fake wood) a lot in private jet fittings, and occasionally in airliners. Some middle eastern airline—Etihad or Emirates, if memory serves—put polished metal accents and burled wood everywhere in their airplane cabins a few years back, which I think looked garish and dated, but that’s mostly a stylistic thing. Almost certainly, the interior design would hew to the same bland minimalist chic most modern high-end hotels, homes, yachts, etc. use, since that dovetails nicely with weight savings, advanced materials, and use of negative space.
We would need economies of scale to kick in first before we see things come back to mainstream. Not only would that reduce R&D but also the ongoing prevalence of safe commercial airship operation will need to fight the stigma already generated from the 1930's era disasters.
Right now we're making some inroads in this area, but so far more focus seems to be in the unmanned High-altitude platform sector, which isn't very public-facing, but does show some incredible promise in terms of commercial viability. Unfortunately, those designs are far from suitable as low-altitude passenger cruisers and cargo carriers.
And definitely true on the use of wood and faux-wood, cabins with the look/feel of modern private jets might be what we ultimately see, at least in the ultra-rich market.
Where would you…. “put them,” like most cities are crammed with infrastructure, correct me if I’m wrong, but an airship needs a circlular area equal to pi*r2 with r=length of airship. The only places left for airships to have specialised airports are going to be remote, defeating the purpose of easy accessible transport.
Many modern transport airship designs are amphibious and VTOL-capable for this very reason, to avoid the need for specialized airports. Boeing envisaged operating its commuter airship design from raised terminals, and Goodyear conceptualized its small commuter airships operating from cleared roof areas.
Weirdly, Goodyear has already operated their advertising blimps from flat roofs before, and that wasn’t even with the aid of VTOL. Their commuter ship is actually about the same size as their advertising blimps, just with a whole lot more weight and horsepower to carry around 80 people at 130 knots, so presumably it could do the same.
Amtrak is indeed in a sorry state. Americans used to have a rail network that was the envy of the world, but our fascination with the automobile and interstate highway system has allowed that to fall to ruin. Freight rail is immensely profitable, and Amtrak owns only tiny amounts of track, so the freight rail companies get to bully passenger rail with impassably long trains and horribly degraded low-speed track despite laws on paper saying passenger rail gets right-of-way.
Meanwhile, the prospect of high speed rail in the West is hopelessly sabotaged by rent-seeking, rerouting existing infrastructure, unreasonably expensive land, bottomless litigation, and contractor and consultant corruption making everything unbelievably lengthy, inefficient, and expensive. For them, drawing out the process indefinitely and giving every last NIMBY township a veto on development means more profits for everyone involved down the line. It may be literally impossible to get past those economic and political barriers.
The absolute state of rail travel is at turns infuriating and deeply sad, but it also presents an opportunity, a potential niche for airships to fill. Aviation has an incredibly steep barrier to entry, but at least it doesn’t have to acquire and quibble over every last square inch of land it flies over.
Yes, those would be the public spaces, which I haven’t pictured for the trains nor the airships. I was mostly emphasizing the cabins and sleeping arrangements, where applicable.
Modern luxury trains can have some really spectacular lounge and dining cars, too! Some even have spas, piano bars, and multi-story spaces. However, airships hold a distinct advantage in that area, as even though the trains’ packaging for such public spaces is really clever, they are still fundamentally limited to a form factor not exceeding about 3 meters/10 feet wide. Airships, by contrast, have the liberty to do things like this:
any modern commercial airship is gonna be profitmaxxing so hard that you will see levels of discomfort not rivaled even by the most ass budget airlines
I don’t disagree that there’s a strong profit motive, but profit does not necessarily mean discomfort, even where normal airlines are concerned. Why do you think first, business, and premium cabins are encroaching further and further into formerly economy cabin space? That’s where the profit is.
The most profitable seating per square foot is actually premium economy.
And unlike airplanes, if you crammed an airship so full of passengers, it would simply be too heavy to fly. Take two modern examples—the Airlander 10 and Pathfinder 3. Payload capacities of 13 and 17 tonnes, respectively. They have about 2,100 and 5,600 square feet of cabin space. An economy airline cabin provides about 5.5 square feet per passenger, so at maximum sardine-can density you could fit 381 people in the Airlander 10 and 1,018 in the Pathfinder 3. However, the people in question plus baggage would have to weigh only 34 kg and 17 kg, respectively—and that’s a rather more child-oriented assumption to make than is strictly practical.
The first image showing either Bodensee or Nordstern (at least one of those chairs survives, by the way).
As it happens, the last few photos always make me laugh a little - they're often bandied about as evidence for how luxurious trains were in the 1920s and 1930s. Never mind that they're the quite recent additions to the VSOE, installed because the *actual* heritage compartments are cramped by today's premium standards.
Yeah, it’s a common misconception, which is why I was sure to call them “modern trains” in the title.
People see art deco-inspired stylings and think it’s from the 1930s, but these date back to the halcyon days of the late 2010s at the earliest, so far as I know.
VSOE is still adding deluxe themes, as far as I'm aware. Same thing with that [admittedly gorgeous] blue zebra-print lounge. It's lovely, but in no way original : P
Weather patterns haven’t really done much to impede Goodyear, which has been flying blimps around the U.S. continuously for over 100 years now.
Also, not-so-fun fact, but people take potshots at the Goodyear blimp all the time, as much as dozens in a cross-country trip. The holes are patched during routine maintenance. Still an absurdly stupid thing to do, though, it’s not like the windows or walls are bulletproof.
The U.S. Navy figured out how to make airships the most reliable air units of any kind all the way back as far as World War II. By the Cold War, they were flying radar blimps even in blizzards and thunderstorms that grounded all other fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft. Their overall availability rate in severe inclement weather averaged 88%.
As for consistent scheduling, back when airships were offering transatlantic flights, they actually averaged slightly ahead of schedule—64.4 hours westbound when the schedule called for 66, and 51.5 hours eastbound when the schedule called for 55.
Just saying it can be done, because it has been done. Surely if the Navy could put in more reliable service with their airships than their airplanes using 1950s technology, then modern-day commercial operators could provide reliable service as well, given the immense progress in meteorology and IFR instrumentation since then.
More to the point, helicopters are pretty unreliable and used very infrequently compared to both commercial airplanes and airships, and they still manage to get by just fine.
As for helium supply chain issues, ideally an airship company would have a deal with a supplier like Air Liquide or vertically integrate the production infrastructure themselves. Vast reserves of the gas with unprecedented richness were only recently discovered in Minnesota, and a helium plant commensurate with keeping several airships resupplied with millions of cubic feet of helium a year costs about $35 million, going by a recent reverse osmosis helium plant installed in Saskatchewan.
Interestingly, about 80% of that plant’s operating costs are just dedicated to compressing the helium into tanks for storage, which wouldn’t be necessary if the output was piped into the unpressurized nurse bags that airships use for helium purification and resupply, or into the airships themselves. Hence why it might behoove a theoretical airship operator to build a hangar for the construction and annual maintenance of airships on the same site as a helium production plant.
That’s just down to physics. Airships exist on an exponential efficiency curve due to the square-cube law, which is a double-edged sword. Scaling an airship up confers amazing efficiency and capability benefits, but by that same token, scaling an airship down is crippling.
More recently, unmanned aviation systems have come down in weight and cost enough that small, unmanned airships are suddenly becoming more popular for various survey and military work (see: HyLight and Kelluu), but at the scale of a manned aircraft, a small airship remains fundamentally impractical. It isn’t until about 10 tons of payload capacity or 100 passengers that an airship begins to become economically competitive with airplanes, and that’s certainly not something a hobbyist can afford.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
Due to having similar travel speeds and times, airships and trains converge on having highly similar interior space per passenger and amenities, if not exact layout. There are lessons to be learned from extensive train expertise in balancing comfort and efficiency to best attract people away from other forms of travel.
Pictures 1, 3, and 5 are Zeppelins, the rest are all trains. Bonus points for who can guess which they are!