 Hey there, and welcome back to the channel, and to the great city of Copenhagen, which has many of the cool features of every urbanist favorite city, Amsterdam, like canals and bikes, although much less bit or ballin, and in my humble opinion an even more interesting transit system that provides incredibly good service around the clock and lots of lessons for almost every other system out there. So let's dive in and see what makes this Danish city so special. Before we get familiar with Copenhagen's metro, S-Train and tram, we need to get a sense for the city. Copenhagen is on Denmark's east coast, fronting up against the Ura Sound Strait that separates it from southern Sweden. This is the city center, and this is the lovely central walk, which is fully pedestrianized and ends at one of the city's main squares, which itself is across the street from Tivoli Gardens, one of the oldest amusement parks in the world and the inspiration for Disneyland sitting right here in central Copenhagen. Next next to Tivoli is Copenhagen Station, a major transport hub for the S-Train system, the metro and longer distance rail services. Just a short walk east through the city from central station, we arrive at the site of the Danish Parliament, although if you're coming from outside of Europe, you'll probably arrive at Copenhagen Airport instead, which is located really close to the city center just 7 kilometers away as the crow flies. And this is where our metro journey begins, on Line M2. Copenhagen's metro currently consists of four lines, although these are only really lines in the sense of being different services. M1 and M2 were both created as the first phase of the Copenhagen metro to serve the island of Ammar, including the new town of Urasta. M1 directly serves Urasta, with a route that terminates with the shared depot between M1 and M2, while M2 runs slightly southeast from central Copenhagen along parts of an old rail alignment to the airport where it terminates. The routes are above-ground throughout much of the island, including sometimes on elevated viaducts such as through Urasta, where the proceeds from land sales were actually used to help fund the metro. To the north, both lines dive underground to pass under central Copenhagen, before turning to the west to connect to the S-Trains and regional rail at Norriport Station. From here, the metro continues west to serve major sites, before popping back above-ground on another old rail alignment and connecting to the S-Trains at two sequential stations, the second of which the M1 and M2, which really are more like one line with a branch, terminate at. Now, frequent viewers might know this already, but the Copenhagen metro is one of the most famous users of the Ansaldo-Breda driverless metro standard, which has now been rolled into Hitachi as the Hitachi Rail Italy driverless metro standard and has been deployed in Greece, Italy and Taiwan and will be deployed in the future in Honolulu and Toronto as part of the Ontario line. The variant of the technology used in Copenhagen is very much light metro, with short and narrow 13 meter long, 2.65 meter wide cars that are connected three to a train. These trains themselves don't have huge capacity, but the design of the lines in Copenhagen, alongside automation, helps improve the numbers through a lot of high frequency service. More importantly, though, the Copenhagen metro is really well connected and there are plentiful opportunities for passengers to transfer from one service to another, freeing up space for more passengers and helping the metro move even more people. A great example of this is at the south end of M1 and M2 at Uresta and the Copenhagen airport respectively, where connections can be made to fast regional trains to central Copenhagen that travel along the very interesting Urasund bridge line, connecting Mainland Europe to Sweden and Norway, and from Copenhagen to Malmö and London, Sweden, both across the Urasund, a distance of roughly 15 kilometers. More recently, in the last few years, Copenhagen has opened its third and fourth metro lines, which, as you might imagine, are again more like one line with a branch. M3, also known as the Cityringen, is a loop line that travels around central Copenhagen, connecting Copenhagen Station, the Danish Parliament, and Osterport Station to the metro for the first time, as well as connecting to the M1 and M2 services in two places. The line is entirely underground, and despite using the same trains as M1 and M2, M3 is not connected to them. It's got its own train maintenance and storage facility south of Copenhagen Station adjacent to the approaching rail corridor. M4 is a unique rail service, similar to Shanghai Line 3, where it shares part of a looping corridor before splitting off in its own direction. In the case of M4, it shares tracks with M3 from Copenhagen Station to Osterport before heading to the reclaimed land of the Nordhavn area where it connects to S trains and rises onto elevated tracks at its terminus, the only above ground section on the line. Enabling this split of the M3 and M4 services is an impressive fully underground junction box leading to underground fly-inders similar to Line 15 of the Paris Metro. Although, again, this operates as two distinct lines, whereas Paris Line 15 will be branded as a single one. Now, as almost all of M3 and M4 underground, an interesting feature of their design and construction was a standardized station box design, which, as with all Copenhagen metro stations, rather uniquely for Europe, has platform screen doors, but not fare gates. This standardized design is implemented with different color palettes and architectural variations at each station, but help keep costs and number of components down. Some stations also feature bike storage areas on their mezzanine levels, catering to Copenhagen's culture of heavy bike use. One of the coolest and most unique features of the Copenhagen Metro is that alongside New York City, it's one of the only metro systems in the world that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is made possible through infrastructure design. Tracks on this system are generally kept far enough apart that one can be worked on and have the power turned off while another is in use. I talked more about how this is possible in a previous video, so make sure to check that out. As a side note, I also want to mention that the design of Copenhagen's vehicles is generally just really nice. Just look at this bus. Now, for a city the size of Copenhagen, I might be a little concerned that the light metro technology usually used by smaller cities might not be sufficient, but Copenhagen has another trick up its rail transit sleeves, and that's its fantastic S trains, which along with some regional trains, like those over the Ura Sunbridge, run 24 hours a day on Friday and Saturday nights, albeit with a simplified service pattern nicely complimenting the metro. The Copenhagen S trains, known locally as S-Tog, are pretty wonderful, and are run by Danish national railway company DSB, akin to how Deutsche Bahn runs many S-Bahn services in Germany. But you're probably asking, why do they look so weird? Well, that's because the front profile is supposed to be similar to the DSB logo, but also because these trains are some of the widest passenger trains out there, certainly on standard gauge tracks at least, at 3.6 meters wide. This enables a super unique interior design with wide benches on each side of the carriage that can each fit three people, lots of interior doors, and a lot of displays that remind me of a hybrid of some metro trains in South America and New York's NTT trains. The actual power systems the trains run on are much more conventional, with 1500 volt DC overhead lines being used network-wide. But trust me, things get weird again, and that's because unlike almost every other S-train or even mainline train out there, the modern S-Tog rolling stock uses tiny, roughly 10 meter long carriages paired up into either four or eight car fully walk-through trains, which themselves are combined to form longer consists. You might think that these short cars are similar to what you'd see on the Chicago L, Berlin, U-Bahn, or the Copenhagen Metro, for that matter. But remember, these cars are also incredibly wide, so they end up looking very funky. But it's all for a good reason. You see, bigger trains require bigger clearances, and the Copenhagen S-Tog is incredibly well used, and so bigger trains were historically a priority. Unfortunately though, with a conventional railcar, when traveling around curves, which the Copenhagen S-Tog has many of, especially tight curves, the car has out-swing, where the coach itself, a line between the two bogies, is increasingly hanging over the edge of the track. Fixing this with the modern Copenhagen S-Tog trains was as simple as having each car be super short and then super wide. But the fun doesn't end there. Since that leaves each car, or segment really, much shorter than what would make sense to support with traditional bogies, the cars instead feature more traditional paired-up wheels, sort of like on a car, and only the head car of the consist gets two sets of wheels, while the rest simply hang from the car that precedes it. Another way the S-Tog system is prioritizing capacity is with the implementation of communications-based train control, digital signaling, and eventually automatic train operation network-wide, which is possible because the system is entirely grade separated, again, fairly unique for an S-Train system. Digital signaling and automated operation is a growing trend outside of metro systems and onto heavily used mainline rail systems, from the famous Yamanote line in Tokyo to Thameslink in London, and now the S-Tog in Copenhagen. Now, if you're wondering why capacity is such a priority, that would be because the entire Copenhagen S-Train network, which, okay, besides the F-line, shares just two tracks between five or six different services that run every 10 minutes each through the city center. These combined services run at roughly 30 trains per hour in peak periods through seven central stations where all services stop, including with four connections to metro. The first of these services are the A and E, which run from the far north of the city to the far south. These lines have a really fun trick where they have local and express service despite being on an entirely two-track line, no passing tracks or anything. This is achieved by having the A run express north of the city and the E run express south of the city. That way, an E train departs just after an A train at the northern end of the line and has a gap form between it and the preceding train until it reaches the city center, where this pattern reverses and the E train can catch back up to the now local A train in front of it. The next service, the C, runs from the northeast of the city through the core before departing to the west and then turning north. The H service operates as a truncated version of the C, ending at Osterport and central Copenhagen. The final radial S train services are the B and DX, which only runs during peak periods. These services run from the northwest, south through the city, and then back out to the west. These various radial S train services historically created the basis of the famous Copenhagen finger plant, where the city would be developed in the shape of a hand, with the city center being the palm and the various S train lines forming fingers of development extending out into the countryside, surrounded by green space. While this plan was not perfectly executed as few are, it really was quite visionary in that it was a really understandable and coherent plan for a city based around a mass transit network. So I really like it. Forming the base of such a hand would be the other oddball S train service. I alluded to earlier, which is the F service, which operates as an arc around outer central Copenhagen, connecting with a variety of different S train and metro services along this arc. The F train being isolated from the other lines is going to be the first to go automated in the late 2020s, and previous discussions have even had it being converted to a full metro line. Speaking of the future, Copenhagen has a lot of different plans. For one, the M4 service will likely be extended further to the north at its north end and it's already being extended southwest at its southern end to connect to the interchange point of the A, E and F S train services at a station, which will be renamed to Copenhagen itself. The northern end of the A and E S train corridor will also see a new infill station, which will open in 2023. Speaking of metro, discussions are also happening around a future potential M5 line. These consultations are still in their early days, but advertisements for them can already be seen around Copenhagen, but such a service would likely serve more artificial islands created in the Urusund, as well as provide additional capacity to the existing core of the transportation network. With that said though, the biggest under construction project today in Copenhagen is probably the Copenhagen light rail, which is a new circumferential service that reminds me a lot of Helsinki's Jokari light rail and we'll outline the palm of the hand of Copenhagen. This project is actually one of the many new tram projects popping up across northern Europe in recent years and will connect six different S-Tog stations as well as other major destinations in Copenhagen suburbs without forcing riders to go into the center and back out, hopefully freeing up more space on the S trains and metro in the process. The line is a total of 28 kilometers long with 29 different stops and is set to open in the mid 2020s. I really appreciate the simple and elegant designs of the stops, especially where there are connections to S train lines. That means altogether, Copenhagen is building a lot of new transit on top of its already really impressive network and a lot of new connections to make traveling around the city even easier in the future. So thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. This video was produced using on the ground footage from Copenhagen Rail Productions and Carl from Copenhagen.