Monday, 30 Sep 2019 11:37 GMT

Moscow metro roars ahead

Using HP Latex technology, a special tiger-themed metro train was launched in Moscow this summer.

The ‘Striped Express’ was created using a HP Latex 570 wide-format printer to raise awareness of the endangered Amur tiger.

Once found throughout the Russian Far East, northern China and the Korean peninsula, hunting has driven the Amur tiger to the brink of extinction.

With around 50,000 passengers taking the Moscow Metro each day, the train was the perfect place to share information about the species.

The installation and printing were prepared by Creative Team Print – a local company which specialises in branding of corporate transport.

The front of the train was wrapped with a large image of a tiger head and the sides of the outside decorated in geometric-style tiger images. The inside was split into five sections of information: environmental protection, scientific research, information and general information about the project.

With around 50,000 passengers taking the Moscow Metro each day, the train was the perfect place to share information about the species

With any project this size, one of the biggest challenges is the amount of work to complete in a certain amount of time.

Using the HP Latex printer, Creative Team Print was able to print and wrap all eight carriages (2,000sq m) in four days, compared to up to 12 days for previous jobs of this kind.

Described by the team as something of the future, one colleague involved in the project tells HP: “The most unexpected nice point that we found out is that HP Latex prints unattended. Our print operator leaves the workplace at 8pm, he hangs a film roll, sets a print job for 50m, sets winding and goes home, and I get push notifications from the HP application.”

An added bonus was that as the maximum running speed of an Amur tiger in the snow is the same as the maximum speed of the Moscow metro (80km an hour), passengers could experience riding at the speed of a tiger.

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