The future of the commuter rail is sitting on Track 1 at North Station. From now through Friday, you can tour two mock-ups of the 75 commuter-rail coaches that the MBTA has ordered, for $189.7 million, from Hyundai Rotem USA, a subsidiary of the Korean manufacturer.

“This is really a ‘coming soon,’ ’’ said Richard A. Davey, the MBTA general manager, while leading reporters on a tour late last week.

The mock-ups are life-sized models of the passenger cars that are scheduled to begin arriving in 2012, becoming the first new coaches in seven years. They will replace the oldest among the MBTA’s fleet of 410 coaches.

The new cars will all be double-decker, retiring single-level models that date to the early 1980s.

Twenty-eight will be “control coaches,’’ meaning they have an operator’s cab at one end. The T’s locomotive-and-coach sets are designed to go in two directions on the same track, with the locomotive pushing one way and pulling the other; the operator’s cab allows the engineer to access controls at the front end when the locomotive is pushing from the rear.

The other 47 “blind coaches’’ have bathrooms instead of operator’s cabs.

The mock-ups, open for viewing from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., look the way a commuter rail coach might if it was built by Hollywood or the Children’s Museum: they are partial replicas, sliced open at one end, with faux gauges, and have plexiglass to prevent visitors from testing out the bathroom.

At first glance, the mock-ups are not too different from the T’s existing coaches, down to the Pepto-Bismol pink wall panels and the plum-colored, vinyl seats. But small details illustrate how the T expects the cars to offer a more comfortable, convenient, and reliable passenger experience.

For the first time, coaches will have LED displays showing the next station, in addition to announcements. For those who prefer to listen, the speakers will have sensors to monitor ambient noise and automatically adjust their volume to compensate.

The current system of switches, relays, and bundled wires that lies beneath the skin of commuter rail coaches will be replaced by a microprocessor control system that will reduce the potential for failure from vibration, said Jeffrey D. Gonneville, director of vehicle engineering for the T. The operator cabs will have display screens that announce faults as they arise — like a brake or HVAC failure in a particular car on the train — and the coaches will have specially designed air-conditioning systems aimed at avoiding the failures that dogged the commuter rail in summer 2006.

The coaches have been designed to the T’s specifications; buying train equipment is not like walking into an automotive showroom.