Twelve Years In, a New Identity

Karstline started twelve years ago because booking an overnight train across three states meant opening four different websites and trusting none of them. Since then we have pushed the category forward in the unglamorous places: seat maps that redraw as coaches fill, one fare page that shows the transfer penalty before you pay, and refunds that clear in a day rather than a billing cycle. People who ride with us tend to stay. Most people have no idea we exist.

So we think it is time to put the name somewhere it can actually be seen. To do that we needed a mark that survives being three centimetres tall on a platform sign, a bright square on a home screen, and a single line of type on a paper ticket. The old one managed the first of those and argued with the other two.

What changed, and why

The 2011 wordmark was drawn for a website and nothing else. It was set in a light serif with a hand-cut ridge beneath it, and below about 40 pixels that ridge collapsed into a smudge. In 2016 we tightened the spacing, added the strata glyph, and moved to a saturated teal that photographs badly under sodium station lighting. Both versions worked, right up until we needed them to work somewhere new.

The 2024 mark drops the glyph entirely. Two words, stacked, cut from a single weight — it reads at forty metres and at forty pixels, and it holds together in one colour when a kiosk printer only has one. The gold came off the ticket stock we have used since the beginning, so calling it a decision is generous.

You will see it roll out over the next few months: the apps first, then the station kiosks, then the fleet. Some of the older platform signage will take until 2026 to turn over, and we have decided that is fine. A rebrand that needs everything to change at once is a rebrand nobody can afford to finish.