Here's a much better article from the Finnish public broadcaster giving more context: https://yle.fi/a/74-20161606
My comments:
The important thing to note that at this point it's just a political posturing and an announcement of intent. They haven't shown any concrete technical plan how this would actually be executed.
> "Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years. Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."
Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.
"Unification to standard gauge on May 31 – June 1, 1886 [United States]
In 1886, the southern railroads agreed to coordinate changing gauge on all their tracks. After considerable debate and planning, most of the southern rail network was converted from 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge to 4 ft 9 in (1,448 mm) gauge, then the standard of the Pennsylvania Railroad, over two days beginning on Monday, May 31, 1886. Over a period of 36 hours, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from the west rail of all the broad gauge lines in the South, moved them 3 in (76 mm) east and spiked them back in place.[6] The new gauge was close enough that standard gauge equipment could run on it without problem. By June 1886, all major railroads in North America, an estimated 11,500 miles (18,500 km), were using approximately the same gauge. To facilitate the change, the inside spikes had been hammered into place at the new gauge in advance of the change. Rolling stock was altered to fit the new gauge at shops and rendezvous points throughout the South. The final conversion to true standard gauge took place gradually as part of routine track maintenance.[6] Now, the only broad-gauge rail tracks in the United States are on some city transit systems."
The costs were already studied in 2023 and were deemed cost ineffective[0]. The report contained three main strategies (VE1, VE2, VE3) with A & B plans for the first two. Costs would be in the range of 10-15+ billion with 15-20+ years allocated for construction time[1, p. 47].
There is one reason for optimism here: Finnish rail network is in quite poor shape and needs major work done anyways. So switching gauge allows funneling more EU funding into these projects that would need to be done either way. I imagine that e.g. the infamous Suomi-rata and ELSA projects will be revived as gauge switch.
>Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.
It is not that hard. Countries like Spain have already two different gauges and have the necessary technology in the trains to change between different systems.
Also it is one party (The Finns) presenting a rail initiative competing with their government partner's (National Coalition) older initiative. It is very unlikely that they both will be implemented.
Fear of a foreign invasion by a country much larger than your, and one that occupied you once for 200 years and attacked you again just 20 years after independence tends to clear the mind.
There ought to be good reason for optimism with this project. The land is already purchased so you “just” need to re-lay the track.
Ballast cleaners* are a thing and they are already pretty amazing at what they do, namely taking apart track and then putting it back, in place, from a machine that runs on those very tracks itself. I could imagine a giant version that not only cleans the ballast but also unties then reties the track back together at the new gauge.
A ballast cleaner wouldn't be enough, because you basically need to swap out the sleepers, too, so you need a complete track-relaying train. And anything involving switches and crossings needs to be done conventionally, because those cannot be rebuilt by simply switching out the sleepers for standard gauge ones.
> The land is already purchased so you “just” need to re-lay the track.
While the details are unknown, this project will almost certainly mean new tracks alongside the old tracks at least for the main lines. Which means that the existing corridors in many places would not have enough space. Additionally there is probably desire to improve the geometry to allow higher speed trains, so that makes the existing corridors less useful
The legend on this site is a joke.
It's almost impossible to see the colors under the numbers, as they're only a few pixels wide: https://i.imgur.com/k8k394D.png
Fascinating map. I was about to ding it for missing all of the Swiss narrow gauge railways (of which there are many), but then I zoomed in a bit more and they all started to appear. Very cool.
Most of Europe is already on the same track width. I'm not sure whether the loading gauge (allowed size of train to fit under bridges) etc. is also standardized; it wasn't for the UK, which is why we can't have nice things like double decker commuter trains.
This only makes it potentially easier to move things from Norway and Sweden through the North of the country, and currently there are no railway from Norway to Finland (and they'll likely won't be) and Sweden to Finland has a single link (and would be destroyed within the first few hours of an invasion).
> Ideally you would want to do this all over Europe.
Not just for military purposes either, economically it makes sense. Trains can just keep going to the edges instead of having to stop and their cargo moved to a different gauge. I've heard they're planning on doing the same in the Baltic states.
> makes it much harder for Russia should they invade
If taking over Finland would help Russia, why didn't it do so in 1945 when it was there for the taking, to little protest from the UK and US? Russian had no use for it then, or now, other than the Karelian isthmus, which is part of Russia. Russia didn't raise much protest of Finland joining NATO. These notions of Russia having designs on Finland are loony.
> will cost billions of euros, affect more than 9,200 km of track, and take decades
How is a change like this going to be implemented? E.g. are they going to mainly update some tracks everywhere (and have two systems running in parallel), or all tracks in selected areas (and have passengers change), or something else?
Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?
In Spain it's ongoing, very slowly, since the first international gauge high-speed rail line started operation in 1992.
It's a slow and quite annoying process. For example, to reach my region, trains from Madrid have to change gauge because my region still has the old one. Apart from spending around 10 minutes doing this, this has caused a lot of problems because it essentially means there is a single model of 300 km/h train that can make it here (others don't support gauge change) and to top it, said model turned out to be highly unreliable. This created a lot of political tension because of course we wanted 300 km/h trains like other regions, but now we're stuck with these lemons and our regional politicians push for gauge change, but the national government doesn't want to do it yet as it affects freight trains.
I hope at some point we get the change done in the whole national network, although generally it moves at a glacial pace. It makes sense to have seamless connection with France and the rest of Europe, and to be able to use the same trains everyone else does.
Currently the leading plan is to build another narrower track alongside the existing ones (so the old trains can keep operating), but it is still in the planning phase. [1] I am not convinced this project is ever going to pay for itself. I feel like you could move cargo from one train to another somewhere near the border for quite a long time with the money it is going to take to convert the entire rail network. Finland is only connected to Sweden and Norway by land in the North so it's not really going to connect the Finnish rail network to Europe either (unless the Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel [2] gets built, but it does not seem likely at this time).
There are several options nowadays. For instance, the Spanish train maker Talgo holds many patents for variable-gauge railroad wheel systems. Such systems can be used at scale for large projects.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_gauge
> Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?
Another large scale infrastructure change right in Finland (or was it Sweden?) was the switch from driving on the left hand side of the road to the right hand side of the road. They actually had local citizens one night dig up street signs and move them to the other side of the street.
> Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?
There were a number of gauge changes, but they were usually quite early on, when the infra was less critical and you could get away with closing lines for months. I'm not sure that there's a real 20th century example, beyond standard gauge high speed alongside non-standard normal-speed (for instance see Spain, and likely soon Ireland).
I'm not sure how complete & up to date that is. But up north where the borders with Sweden and Norway are there isn't a whole lot of rail it seems. Norway's rail network doesn't extend that far. But Sweden gets pretty close to the Finnish border. I'm guessing a priority would be first connecting to their rail networks and then providing progressively more access to industrial hubs and eventually regional hubs.
This might also help with freight to the rest of Europe. Currently the only way into the country for freight is by ship (ferries, containers) or by road via northern Sweden. Sweden has decent north south rail connections and a bridge to Denmark. So extending coastal rail to Oulu would allow access to the rest of Finland for freight trains.
> Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?
Baltic states attempted this (project Rail Baltica). Lots of EU money were spent with no visible result. I guess, several people in Baltic states became super rich, but in terms of rail infrastructure nothing was done.
The project is theoretically a good idea but it's not really practical, and nobody is honestly suggesting it for real -- surely plans are cheap, and planning is even cheaper. But there are fewer than handful of railway lines crossing over the eastern border to Russia. Those can be blown up for good, for long enough distance that it's not feasible for Russia to rebuild track and reconnect to the main network should they, at some point, want to fall in love with Finnish rail. Other than that, the only other rail connection is to Sweden up north where there's already some arrangements to accommodate two gauges. At this point we run out of new reasons to change the gauge, Finland is effectively an island when it comes to European railway network. Surely it would be nice to standardise with the rest of the Europe but it's not much more than that.
> But there are fewer than handful of railway lines crossing over the eastern border to Russia. Those can be blown up for good, for long enough distance that it's not feasible for Russia to rebuild track and reconnect to the main network should they ...
There is no such thing as "blown up for good" for a railway line. And similar for "not feasible for Russia to rebuild". Destroying enemy-held (or soon-to-be-captured) rail lines was a thing, at scale, in WWII. On the Russian Front. Similar for rebuilding captured rail lines to convert them from "enemy gauge" to "our gauge". At best, using a different gauge and rail destruction are delaying & resource-draining tactics.
Trump recently stated that the US is eager to have massive amounts of trade with Russia. The most logical place to do that in that area would be Konigsberg, and exploit the Suwalki Gap.
For those who don't know, there's a whole system alongside the eastern post-Soviet border: you arrive on a train, all the carriages are lifted and fitted with proper wheels.
Good for them. Better integration obviously, but even more important, when ruzzians will invade, they won't have as easy logistics as in Ukraine. War logistics can be structured very differently, and unlike for example USA, ruzzia moves all of their assets on rail, due to immense distances and shitty road coverage. The major battles in Ukraine were over train lines and connectors, for example coastal Crimea to Azov line, or major lines in Donbass region. And in those areas they has success which they managed to protect later on. While in the areas with bad rail access, they lost spectacularly due to logistics, like north of Kyiv.
TBH, it seems like a questionable way to spend EU money. Technically, it's fascinating, but unless it's part of a broader geopolitical or long-term interoperability strategy, it's hard to justify the costs.
In Spain, we already deal with both Iberian and standard gauges—trains like the Talgo models can change gauges with minimal delay. It's not seamless, but it works reasonably well. Spain also has the world's second largest high speed train network.
What the EU could really benefit from is greater support for small companies and independent freelancers who are driving innovation. Unfortunately, governments (Spain included) often treat them as revenue sources, with high taxes and complex regulations, while large corporations can navigate around much of that with ease.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are also putting in a "standard gauge" line, so they can interoperate with the rest of Europe.
What coupler are they going to use? Switching from Russian automatic couplers to European buffer and chain freight couplers is a step backwards. (It's amazing that the EU hasn't modernized freight couplers. There was something called "Eurocoupler" proposed in the 1970s, but it was never implemented. A "Digital Automatic Coupler" with data passthrough is being proposed now.)
Russian military logistics are train based. If Finland switches away from their rail gauge, it's safer from Russian attack, since Russia wouldn't be able to easily carry supplies farther inside Finland.
Doing this is a really nice opportunity for Finland. The should bundle it with many other upgrade. Doing general maintenance. Upgrade all the signaling (ETCS L2). Overhead electrify everything. Do minor speed upgrades. And so on.
If you are not doing all of this at once, this likely isn't worth it.
Conversion to a narrower gauge should be a fairly straightforward process, unless concrete sleepers are in use. New axles or outright replacement of trucks shouldn't take multiple years of effort.
We did such things in the US in month long long ago.
You ignore the scale of the project, still present an estimate and compare the effort to something irrelevant, from a very different time and place. Are you my PM?
I understand why they do it, but I am curious why there is nobody in this kind of position that is going for something that is better in technical terms, not just compatible. For example, 2 meters or even 2.5m would provide better load capacity and better stability for high speed curves, while keeping the width of the carriages the same in order to fit existing tunnels. For new freight lines even 3 meters may be much better that refitting to the relatively narrow standard.
Freight-wise, better load capacity can also be solved by ballastless track, using additional axles, or running longer trains. Passenger-wise, better stability can also be solved with canting - and wider tracks means significantly larger curves.
In return you get to buy significantly more expensive one-off trains and are unable to connect to your neighbors. Not exactly a great deal, is it?
Note that the proposal for this came from the EU Commission over the last few years - the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T). Initially Finland pushed back on it as being too expensive.
There is little benefit for the cost for Finland. Currently I believe that there are no railway between Finland and the rest of the EU, with the first one to Sweden under construction (and obviously a huge detour since the only land connection is through the North of the country).
I'd like to have high speed railways in my country, not some decades long political conversion project. If we need railways that can go across the borders of our neighboring countries, build new ones instead of upgrading existing ones.
Upgrading is magnitudes faster than building new. Apparently the current Finnisch idea is to actually build new tracks next to the old one, which requires wider beds, which requires more land, which requires more negotiations. Replacing in situ would be faster, but you would cripple your whole network for the duration.
I'm kind of surprised that this hadn't already been decided on years ago, seeing as the Baltics for example have been working towards this switch for years now already as part of the Euro Trans-T project.
Good to have ambition and invest in the future. If they can straighten tight bends, double track judiciously, improve gradients lots of things get better.
anti-invasion projects. Up next posting pro Russian narratives or other anti democratic ideologies gets you deported to the real existing implementation of said ideology. The free speach "autocracies pushing internal subversion" has to go. Yes, this cuts left, right and center.
I very much doubt it. Change to dual-gauge requires replacing the sleepers, and if they do the very hard work of replacing the sleepers, then why keep broad gauge?
Maybe they would choose to downgrade a single track where there's two, and half of each station's lines, but that would make it very difficult to schedule trains in both directions on a single track. So, they're probably not going to do that either.
The only feasible way to do this (based on preliminary reports) is to simply build new track next to old track in the same right-of-way. The transition period would last decades.
Every country in such position wishes for that (sans mandatory smaller part of population utterly brainwashed on some simplistic panslavic anti-soros fairy tales, when in reality russians cough cough soviets killed more slavs in past 150 years than all external adversaries combined, included nazi WWII warfare and genocides).
I don't think russians like to acknowledge how hated their country actually is, universally, across all countries that ever dealt with them on their soil long term, including former soviet republics and ie Warsaw pact. Not russian civilian population just to be clear but country as a whole definitely, just a consistently safe harbor for biggest scum mankind can produce.
2032 just to start is way too late. The invasion will start before the end of the current US presidential term. Although it's useful to plan for the best case as well, I guess.
France has its own nuclear power and I don't think it could really avoid being involved like we did for Ukraine if war was to cross EU border (my perspective as a French citizen)
The difference is so marginal it doesn't matter, and is certainly not worth the cost.
Both the heaviest cargo trains and the fastest passenger trains (ignoring monorails, maglevs etc., just normal style trains running on two steel rails) on the planet run on standard gauge.
Now we only need the announcement of Deutsche Bahn to convert fully to electrical, abandoning the gas locomotives, paving the way to interact with more advanced railway nations like Poland.
Not incidentally, 1524mm is exactly 5 feet. Which was the rail gauge widely used in the southern US states. The Russian tsar hired someone who had been building railroads in the US south to design his railroad, and here we are.
The 1520mm was some Soviet effort to "metrify" their railways while keeping compatibility with existing rolling stock.
Interesting. In practice they seem compatible? There were frequent trains running between Helsinki and Saint Petersburg, I remember taking it and there was a seamless transition across the border.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
vesinisa|9 months ago
My comments:
The important thing to note that at this point it's just a political posturing and an announcement of intent. They haven't shown any concrete technical plan how this would actually be executed.
> "Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years. Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."
Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.
sbuttgereit|9 months ago
"Unification to standard gauge on May 31 – June 1, 1886 [United States]
In 1886, the southern railroads agreed to coordinate changing gauge on all their tracks. After considerable debate and planning, most of the southern rail network was converted from 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge to 4 ft 9 in (1,448 mm) gauge, then the standard of the Pennsylvania Railroad, over two days beginning on Monday, May 31, 1886. Over a period of 36 hours, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from the west rail of all the broad gauge lines in the South, moved them 3 in (76 mm) east and spiked them back in place.[6] The new gauge was close enough that standard gauge equipment could run on it without problem. By June 1886, all major railroads in North America, an estimated 11,500 miles (18,500 km), were using approximately the same gauge. To facilitate the change, the inside spikes had been hammered into place at the new gauge in advance of the change. Rolling stock was altered to fit the new gauge at shops and rendezvous points throughout the South. The final conversion to true standard gauge took place gradually as part of routine track maintenance.[6] Now, the only broad-gauge rail tracks in the United States are on some city transit systems."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_the_United_Stat...
mimsee|9 months ago
[0]: https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/1410829/report-shows-that-cha...
[1]: https://api.hankeikkuna.fi/asiakirjat/697c1f25-332b-40ed-9d6...
zokier|9 months ago
Vinnl|9 months ago
dotancohen|9 months ago
cladopa|9 months ago
It is not that hard. Countries like Spain have already two different gauges and have the necessary technology in the trains to change between different systems.
tarvaina|9 months ago
dang|9 months ago
WesolyKubeczek|9 months ago
oblio|9 months ago
gorgoiler|9 months ago
Ballast cleaners* are a thing and they are already pretty amazing at what they do, namely taking apart track and then putting it back, in place, from a machine that runs on those very tracks itself. I could imagine a giant version that not only cleans the ballast but also unties then reties the track back together at the new gauge.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballast_cleaner
iggldiggl|9 months ago
zokier|9 months ago
While the details are unknown, this project will almost certainly mean new tracks alongside the old tracks at least for the main lines. Which means that the existing corridors in many places would not have enough space. Additionally there is probably desire to improve the geometry to allow higher speed trains, so that makes the existing corridors less useful
blueflow|9 months ago
https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=gauge&lat=62.774837258...
thrdbndndn|9 months ago
bartread|9 months ago
jabl|9 months ago
reddalo|9 months ago
It makes more sense for islands such as Ireland to retain their old gauge.
radicalbyte|9 months ago
Ideally you would want to do this all over Europe.
pjc50|9 months ago
mytailorisrich|9 months ago
So little actual difference.
Cthulhu_|9 months ago
Not just for military purposes either, economically it makes sense. Trains can just keep going to the edges instead of having to stop and their cargo moved to a different gauge. I've heard they're planning on doing the same in the Baltic states.
tonymet|9 months ago
regularization|9 months ago
If taking over Finland would help Russia, why didn't it do so in 1945 when it was there for the taking, to little protest from the UK and US? Russian had no use for it then, or now, other than the Karelian isthmus, which is part of Russia. Russia didn't raise much protest of Finland joining NATO. These notions of Russia having designs on Finland are loony.
thih9|9 months ago
How is a change like this going to be implemented? E.g. are they going to mainly update some tracks everywhere (and have two systems running in parallel), or all tracks in selected areas (and have passengers change), or something else?
Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?
Al-Khwarizmi|9 months ago
It's a slow and quite annoying process. For example, to reach my region, trains from Madrid have to change gauge because my region still has the old one. Apart from spending around 10 minutes doing this, this has caused a lot of problems because it essentially means there is a single model of 300 km/h train that can make it here (others don't support gauge change) and to top it, said model turned out to be highly unreliable. This created a lot of political tension because of course we wanted 300 km/h trains like other regions, but now we're stuck with these lemons and our regional politicians push for gauge change, but the national government doesn't want to do it yet as it affects freight trains.
I hope at some point we get the change done in the whole national network, although generally it moves at a glacial pace. It makes sense to have seamless connection with France and the rest of Europe, and to be able to use the same trains everyone else does.
andriamanitra|9 months ago
[1] https://yle.fi/a/74-20161793
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki%E2%80%93Tallinn_Tunne...
yevgeby|9 months ago
dotancohen|9 months ago
jabl|9 months ago
http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8/gauge.html
Obviously doing this today would be a much more complicated affair, considering the much higher speeds and weights of contemporary trains.
rsynnott|9 months ago
There were a number of gauge changes, but they were usually quite early on, when the infra was less critical and you could get away with closing lines for months. I'm not sure that there's a real 20th century example, beyond standard gauge high speed alongside non-standard normal-speed (for instance see Spain, and likely soon Ireland).
aziaziazi|9 months ago
That article has a short paragraph mentioning it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44033310
jillesvangurp|9 months ago
Here's a helpful overview from wikipedia: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Finnish_railroad_netwo...
I'm not sure how complete & up to date that is. But up north where the borders with Sweden and Norway are there isn't a whole lot of rail it seems. Norway's rail network doesn't extend that far. But Sweden gets pretty close to the Finnish border. I'm guessing a priority would be first connecting to their rail networks and then providing progressively more access to industrial hubs and eventually regional hubs.
This might also help with freight to the rest of Europe. Currently the only way into the country for freight is by ship (ferries, containers) or by road via northern Sweden. Sweden has decent north south rail connections and a bridge to Denmark. So extending coastal rail to Oulu would allow access to the rest of Finland for freight trains.
Just some thoughts.
hapidjus|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
russellbeattie|9 months ago
Check back in in a few years and all your questions will be answered.
gspr|9 months ago
anticodon|9 months ago
Baltic states attempted this (project Rail Baltica). Lots of EU money were spent with no visible result. I guess, several people in Baltic states became super rich, but in terms of rail infrastructure nothing was done.
yason|9 months ago
bell-cot|9 months ago
There is no such thing as "blown up for good" for a railway line. And similar for "not feasible for Russia to rebuild". Destroying enemy-held (or soon-to-be-captured) rail lines was a thing, at scale, in WWII. On the Russian Front. Similar for rebuilding captured rail lines to convert them from "enemy gauge" to "our gauge". At best, using a different gauge and rail destruction are delaying & resource-draining tactics.
mmooss|9 months ago
Why do you say that?
Hilift|9 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6nigsberg
troupo|9 months ago
In the poorer countries like my home country these look like this: https://dmitriid.com/media/1/3/7/1/f50f-720b-4f59-873a-75c51... (article: https://dmitriid.com/romania-2023-chisinau-bucharest)
Yizahi|9 months ago
helsinkiandrew|9 months ago
indiantinker|9 months ago
In Spain, we already deal with both Iberian and standard gauges—trains like the Talgo models can change gauges with minimal delay. It's not seamless, but it works reasonably well. Spain also has the world's second largest high speed train network.
What the EU could really benefit from is greater support for small companies and independent freelancers who are driving innovation. Unfortunately, governments (Spain included) often treat them as revenue sources, with high taxes and complex regulations, while large corporations can navigate around much of that with ease.
varsketiz|9 months ago
apexalpha|9 months ago
Imagine the cost if it was the other way around... Nevertheless, a valiant effort by the Finnish.
I guess we eventually have to do Ukraine (and Iberia?) too, so hopefully the lessons learned can be applied there.
IAmBroom|9 months ago
Animats|9 months ago
What coupler are they going to use? Switching from Russian automatic couplers to European buffer and chain freight couplers is a step backwards. (It's amazing that the EU hasn't modernized freight couplers. There was something called "Eurocoupler" proposed in the 1970s, but it was never implemented. A "Digital Automatic Coupler" with data passthrough is being proposed now.)
Havoc|9 months ago
larsnystrom|9 months ago
oblio|9 months ago
panick21_|9 months ago
If you are not doing all of this at once, this likely isn't worth it.
IAmBroom|9 months ago
The idea is simple. Ensuring everything is smooth and safe = cost multiplier.
pacifika|9 months ago
mikewarot|9 months ago
We did such things in the US in month long long ago.
thih9|9 months ago
iggldiggl|9 months ago
Which they are, as even a quick search would have shown.
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
barbazoo|9 months ago
eru|9 months ago
ur-whale|9 months ago
lol, I guess that this is only half of the equation, the other being to fairly obviously reduce military mobility for another class of vehicles.
AdrianB1|9 months ago
crote|9 months ago
Freight-wise, better load capacity can also be solved by ballastless track, using additional axles, or running longer trains. Passenger-wise, better stability can also be solved with canting - and wider tracks means significantly larger curves.
In return you get to buy significantly more expensive one-off trains and are unable to connect to your neighbors. Not exactly a great deal, is it?
BurningFrog|9 months ago
But 89mm is probably too small a margin for that to work.
cromulent|9 months ago
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/infrastructu...
mytailorisrich|9 months ago
dewey|9 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eA5oEXEFlI
harha_|9 months ago
Propelloni|9 months ago
It's a tradeoff and worthy of deliberation.
MrDresden|9 months ago
vonnik|9 months ago
ggm|9 months ago
ashoeafoot|9 months ago
worldsayshi|9 months ago
helsinkiandrew|9 months ago
M95D|9 months ago
Maybe they would choose to downgrade a single track where there's two, and half of each station's lines, but that would make it very difficult to schedule trains in both directions on a single track. So, they're probably not going to do that either.
Sharlin|9 months ago
chinathrow|9 months ago
Intesting times.
varsketiz|9 months ago
jajko|9 months ago
I don't think russians like to acknowledge how hated their country actually is, universally, across all countries that ever dealt with them on their soil long term, including former soviet republics and ie Warsaw pact. Not russian civilian population just to be clear but country as a whole definitely, just a consistently safe harbor for biggest scum mankind can produce.
entropyneur|9 months ago
openplatypus|9 months ago
> The government is expected to make the final decision by July 2027, with construction starting around 2032.
eviks|9 months ago
You can't announce migration if you haven't decided you plan to migrate...
IAmBroom|9 months ago
jarek83|9 months ago
forty|9 months ago
barbazoo|9 months ago
cake-rusk|9 months ago
jabl|9 months ago
Both the heaviest cargo trains and the fastest passenger trains (ignoring monorails, maglevs etc., just normal style trains running on two steel rails) on the planet run on standard gauge.
rurban|9 months ago
MiguelX413|9 months ago
IAmBroom|9 months ago
Ekaros|9 months ago
jabl|9 months ago
The 1520mm was some Soviet effort to "metrify" their railways while keeping compatibility with existing rolling stock.
freetonik|9 months ago
pif|9 months ago
[deleted]
meindnoch|9 months ago