https://greatnews.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/linia-ferata...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_Class_Sm6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railway...
The 1520mm was some Soviet effort to "metrify" their railways while keeping compatibility with existing rolling stock.
I also remember reading a long time ago that there were two engineering schools: one modeled that tighter tolerances would decrease oscillations and vibrations and the other predicted exactly the opposite. I think in the end they settled on natural experiments. Hope I didn't make this up, need to search for sources.
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)
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.
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.
Any hindrance we can put on the Finnish-Russian border to stop them just unloading 12 cars of fresh troops in the middle of the country is a good thing.
(Of course a more thorough analysis would probably come to the conclusion that better logistics is worth it. There's still an opportunity cost for those conscripts who could do something else instead, like dying in zerg rushes on the Ukrainian front. And even though those conscripts are 'free' they still require chow and a place to sleep etc.)
Now you’re just being silly.
Related, I have seen one guy, over and over say "Why isn't Ukraine hitting Russian electric train transformer stations". I don't have a good answer, most of Russia's rail network is electric, transformers blow up easily, there are many of them, and they would be very slow to replace. Ukraine clearly has deep strike capabilities, and Russia cant defend every transformer. I don't think it's a humanitarian issue, or at this point even an issue with the US telling Ukraine they can't hit those targets.
I would compare it to the Natanz cyber attack which reportedly cost a fortune and caused lots of business losses around the world. It only set the Iranian uranium refinement back a few percent.
Then Obama comes and talks to them, strikes a deal. That solved the issue entirely and cost much less. Of course then Trump comes and messes it all up again but that's another story.
https://www.nti.org/education-center/facilities/natanz-enric...
So I stand by my statement that his assessment is not wrong, even if it isn't as outcome changing as some may hope. It is however one of the many straws heaped upon the camel's back.
As for the transformer issue, I would imagine that these are somewhat related. Their train based logistics are inefficient, so Ukraine doesn't need to stop the trains running. If they did the russians may find a more efficient solution.
Even Unicef has a massive logistics center in Denmark with pallets of stuff categorised and ready to be sent for any emergency: https://www.unicef.org/supply/warehousing-and-distribution
Russia just likes to kill the shit out of their neighbours which is a lot easier logistically.
Those few connections in the sparse north of the country are the entire point.
Of course, if it does go that far, tanks and trains can move rolling stock, rip up the tracks, blow up bridges and other infrastructure behind them if they're forced to retreat.
IIRC the diff to European standard is closer to 10cm, still doable but a hurdle compared to just driving a trainload of troops to the middle of Helsinki it's a bit harder
> The difference between Finnish and Russian gauge is 4mm
Yes they are. Of course practical tolerances including allowances for wear and there are large enough that things can be made to work, but in terms of nominal construction tolerances for example, 4 mm can easily eat up all your construction tolerances or even exceed them.
1524 - 1435 = 89
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railway...
Clearly not "doable", without guage changing bogies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torne_River_Railway_Bridge#/me...
Even if you were to 4-rail every line, you'd potentially run into loading gauge issues (you would have to offset the current centre of the bogies, go too far one way and you collide with platforms, too far the other way and you collide with oncoming trains)
As for the loading gauge, yes, of course. On the plus side, this is Finland, most of the lines is in the middle of nowhere and single track even. Maybe the best option for them is to just build 1435 in parallel whereever possible, and just merge where not otherwise practical (bridges, tunnels, populated areas & stations). I don't even think it's that infeasible considering Finland's layout. I'd wager there are only a handful of specific locations that need expensive work.
Conceptually? Nothing.
But building such trains, at scale, takes a load of resources. Resources which could otherwise be used to build tanks, guns, missiles, and similar high-priority products.
> what's to prevent
Russian lack of logistical planning.
This doesn't seem like it can be a goal given
> maybe in 2032 we can start construction
I mean unless the plan is to assume Russia won't attack until e.g. 2040 when construction will be complete && Russia can't implement multi-gauge trains that Spain is already using now?
And in any case, just as in computer security, a security posture does not need to be unassailable, it just needs to be expensive enough to deter the enemy. NATO countries (well, the ones that haven't already been compromised by Russia) will be happy to fund the gauge switch, as would the EU in general for the sake of greater economic integration. Meanwhile, it increases the costs on Russia and slows their advance. It's a win no matter what.
He's absolutely not harmless, but neither should we allow ourselves to be distracted by phony countermeasures against the Russian threat, like this gauge shift thing clearly is in my opinion.
He's co-opting the red army's defeat of Nazi Germany for his own popularity purposes. Which is impressive, considering he's also disavowing communism. It would hardly have been possible, if it weren't for fringe (but not fringe enough) movements in Eastern Europe playing along with it. Not because they're pro-Russian, far from it, but because their old nationalist groups often were aligned with the nazis, and they want to rehabilitate them. Putin and these groups totally agree that the conflict should be framed as being between Russia and these groups.
This is dangerously naive. Propagandists like Putin don't need real grievances, they're happy to invent grievances and brainwash the population into believing them. In light of this fact, there's zero downside and nonzero upside to decouple from Russia (at least for any state which intends to remain independent) which makes it a no-brainer.
Or maybe you accept that you are human too, vulnerable to the same thing, and maybe you are the brainwashed one, but you don't care?
Going down either of these roads ends you up with the neonazis in the long run (and yes, Russia has a lot of them too).
So no, it's not naive to point out the good points that feed the propaganda. What's naive is to think that dictators can manufacture good propaganda out of thin air anyway so it doesn't matter what "our side" is guilty of.
Putin is a gangster, not a cult leader. He's in it for himself, the people around him are in it for themselves. No one thinks he's selfless, least of all regular Russian people. It takes effort to keep something like that together. Unfortunately, he gets help from his foreign enemies.
No, I don't read that at all. There's plenty of Russian propaganda that Westerners have fallen for hook, line, and sinker, chief among them the idea that all Russian speakers are actually Russian and want to be a part of the Russia.
The point is that the propagandists don't need to base their propaganda on truth. A salient historical example here is actually World War II: the Germans tried to provoke Poland into overreacting and causing a major incident in Danzig to justify their invasion of Poland. The Poles refused to play ball, so when the appointed hour came, the Germans made up some atrocity and used it as the basis of the declaration of war, faking the evidence early in the invasion. Given that Russia has already used a similar pretext regarding Russian speakers in Ukraine, it's not a surprise that the Baltics are nervous about Russia doing the exact some thing with regards to Russian speakers in their territories.
Oh yeah, other westerners, but not you. You take the foreign policy think tank line that Russians actually want to be balkanized. Just after saying that Putin has succeeded in brainwashing the population to go along with whatever he wants without need for excuses based on good points.
Or, to use an analogy with a different language, Putin's argument is akin to saying that a majority of Irishman want to be a part of England, because they speak English.
Don't confuse language for cultural identity.
(And, FWIW, I have fallen for this propaganda in the past; I've just been successfully educated since then as to why the simplistic linguistic map is fundamentally the wrong way to look at the conflict.)
Ironically, this war will probably end up doing more to truly hammer out a single cohesive Ukrainian nation out of all the ethnic Russians in Ukraine than all the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists before it - assuming that Russia loses the war, that is.
More importantly, though, it can only be effectively applied on Russian territory, while real grievances among minority Russian populations in other countries can be exploited into fifth-columnizing them.
I think they are up to the challenge of whipping up some BS casus belli and scaring would-be protesters into submission.
Following logic it also increases your own costs and wastes money that could've been allocated to produce weapons and other more effective preventive measures.
Where did I say about single thing: "...weapons and other more effective preventive measures..."
Looking from the other angle - should Russia attack it'll trigger article 5. Russia can not win conventional war with NATO. It is just laughable. They're not that suicidal. And if they are it'll escalate to nuclear and then the railroad will be your last worry.
We need to have resolve!
Without the US Navy, NATO loses any war in the Baltic Sea. If Putin thinks the US won't respect Article 5, then he'll attack anyway. And if the US Navy is annihilated in a war against China, he'll attack anyway. Finland needs all the separation from Russia it can get.
Or Kazakstan, although China might object there.
But if Putin could do that (he can't), railway gauges would be the least of our worries.
As to railways surviving it’s relatively difficult to effectively destroy rail infrastructure. Making the call to cripple your internal infrastructure is tough especially in such a dire situation, it’s also a really large target. Taking out some strategic bridges is easier but most local issues can be quickly fixed when you talking million men armies.
These projects are sloooooooow
Fear is why Finland allied with the Nazis.
Fear is why the Soviet Union also signed a pact with the Nazis and invaded Ukraine.
It's easy to justify anything with fear.
... or maybe because Fins got invaded by Soviets.
Just like fear of "greater finland" made the Soviets invade in the first place.
It's fear all the way down. The only difference is the validity of those fears. Obviously your country's enemies' fears were always invalid while your country's allies' fears were always justified.
And the fear of Poland made the Nazis invade Poland, right?
Their propaganda no doubt presented things this way, but that was far from the truth. Much like Nazis had to stage a Polish attack on German radio station[1] to justify their invasion of Poland, the USSR had to fabricate the shelling of Mainila[2] to justify the invasion of Finland, because neither Poland nor Finland were apparently threatening enough on their own.
Russia never went on an extermination drive in order to create an ethnically pure ethnostate.
The biggest western geopolitical mistake of the 2020s is assuming that Israel isnt run by Nazis but Russia is.
>Their propaganda no doubt presented things this way
Every country presents its propaganda in its own way. Pointing that a country that you consider an enemy publishes propaganda without reference to your own serves merely to underscore that accident of birth dictates which flavor of propaganda you believe.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct.
Small distinction to you perhaps, but to me it's a bit more than just "technical".
Which "fear" prompted the Soviets to invade Romania in 1940? Which "fear" prompted the Soviets to invade Poland in 1939? Which "fear" prompted the Soviets to invade the Baltics in 1940?
Ah, now I remember, the "fear" of not being the premier colonial power.
The other one is about 300 sqkm with 5 million people.
When in doubt, use basic logic.
Your argument is the same as Iraq being a realistic threat against the US.
Also, list of Russian neighbors not threatened or invaded by Russia:
Belarus (pushed into a sort of union state)
China (too big)
Japan (I think)
Mongolia (I think)
Azerbaijan (I think)
List of neighbors threatened or invaded by Russia:
Ukraine
Georgia
Moldova (Transnistria occupied since 1991)
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Finland
Poland
Your argument appears to be that your enemy's fear driven by losing 27 million people during an invasion/war of extermination is exactly equivalent to your country's fear of weapons that were imagined solely for the purposes of justifying an invasion.
My argument was that it is quite easy to get a domestic population to treat all of the enemy's legitimate fears as utterly irrelevant while treating bullshit domestic fears as existential.
In a way I think you helped make this point for me by forgetting about those 27 million deaths.
If only there was a reason for this.
It's more of mystery why particular kinds of westerners are especially sanctimonious about Moscow while bending over backwards to excuse nearly identical behavior from the west.
Quick essay for 20 points, those countries all decided to join NATO BEFORE Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan.
WHY did they decide to try to join NATO? Who were they running away from and why?
The lie was laid bare once they were actually attacked. Article 5 protections - the only reason they are fighting this war - came off the table as soon as it became clear that the rival gang wasn't going to be taken down.
Quick essay for 30 points: write to a grieving mother campaigining against gangs explaining why even though her son joined the crips for protection and got murdered by a blood in the initiation phase, she needs to STFU about kids staying out of gangs. The reason is simple: she needs to STFU because several other 14 year olds who joined the crips for the promise of protection haven't yet had that promise tested.
The Western alliance is doing some horrible things worldwide, but your point of view regarding Eastern Europe is horribly mistaken. I'm fairly sure you have no idea what you're talking about, and you're probably not from there. I'd basically classify you as a tankie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
I'm doubly going to classify you as a tankie as you're dodging the question of WHO Eastern Europe was running from (and WHY).
Also another quick essay for 40 points: who has voluntarily joined Russian led alliances (except for Armenia, which is currently reconsidering its life choices).
If we were having this argument inside the Soviet Union in 1968 you'd be calling me different slurs for an identical reason - because I wouldnt have supported sending the tanks into czechoslovakia. and you would, coz your calculus is "my empire justified, other empire unjustified".
This isnt any different to when I was called a Tankie in 2003 coz I didnt want to send the tanks in to Baghdad by people who accused me of being pro Saddam.
You apparently dont have the capacity to see pacifism, only traitors.
Wary? Yes.
Seems Necessary given current circumstances.
(After peace comes, and enough time passes, someday, we will be friends again)
You've missed a few significant figures there, Finland's area is: 338145 km2
And your idea is that they had zero reason to fear invasion from the west? Even though that is precisely what happened just a few years later?
It is totally ahistoric to pin any actions of USSR on fear or just reaction to external events. If WWII was continuation of WWI (in my and many opinion it was) both Germany and USRR were revanchist powers that wanted to reverse outcome of WWI. Many forgot that Russia later USSR lost WWI badly. Plus Stalin after very, very, bloody consolidation of power in 30ties was ready (in fact it was imperative for regime stability) to start outward aggression/expansion.
Furthermore historian believe that Stalin knew that confrontation w/ Germany is inevitable but (more popular opinion) was estimating it will happen one year later at least or (less popular, even fringe opinion) was amassing forces to attack Germany and was cough by Nazis w/ "pants down". Either scenario would be explanation for initial successes of Operation Barbarossa.
Fun fact - last train with grain from USSR to Germany crossed border few minutes before start of Operation Barbarossa.
In summary - Soviets and Nazis were allies till 1941 - both parties know it was tactical alliance not unlike USSR - GB/USA against Germany and at the very end Japan. Note that after WWII there was cold war between former allies - not unlike like hot war between former alliance parties of Nazis and Soviets.
Second fun fact: Orwell's "oceania was always at war with eastasia" from 1984 is direct reference to how alliances were changing during WWII.
...two years after Molotov Ribbentrop.
If they had nothing to worry about Japan it logically follows that they had nothing to worry about Hitler either as was shown by the Molotov Ribbentrop pact.
In 1939 the Soviet military was a disaster, also. It's difficult to overstate just how exposed they were.
>Furthermore historian believe that Stalin knew that confrontation w/ Germany is inevitable
They were right to be afraid.
>In summary - Soviets and Nazis were allies till 1941 -
In summary, out of fear which was entirely legitimate. Fun fact: the only difference between them and Finland is that Finland gets excused for allying to Hitler out of fear by its western allies.
Does Russia still own a lot of 5-foot rolling stock? (Genuine question.) That’s what Finland is on [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railw...
I'm sure EU taxpayers will be presented with a solid business case demonstrating value for money before our €billions are spent on a project such as this.
Oh, wait, this is the EU.
Most likely a deal would be thrashed out between key players via Whatsapp but that "due to their ephemeral nature"[0] we aren't entitled to read any of their messages.
[0] see https://www.politico.eu/article/pfizergate-ursula-von-der-le...
"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...
I wonder if one can do anything like this with the current concrete sleepers and thermite welded tracks.
The sleepers are molded with preset widths, however, and would need replacement.
It might be easier to change today than it was in 1886. Back then, trains were really the only means of travel between cities. Today, there are less passenger trains than back then, though more freight (even with trucks and planes). But freight diversions/delays could be scheduled well in advance and have alternative means. Not to mention, since then we've developed variable gauge train tech. A subset of trains could run during the cutover.
It's likely more costly today, but less disruptive.
Remember that freight is more than just moving pallets of finished goods to Amazon warehouses. It doesn't matter if you've given the cows a month's advance notice, if they don't have feed they're still going to starve; and no matter how many KPIs you dangle at the silos, they're only going to hold x amount of reserve grain.
Anyone looking at massive losses will pay the sticker shock to put it on trucks. Anyone who can afford to shut down instead will wait. That's the system working as intended.
If the US really wanted to get it done, they could involve the army and various state national guards. They have tons of trained semi and heavy truck drivers, way more than most people would assume. Most states also have tons of trained drivers for their massive snow plows and highway repair trucks and stuff. The only thing stopping these massive projects is money and lack of imagination.
Did you not see how the markets recently reacted to certain components merely doubling in cost due to tariffs? In what world do you live in where the agricultural margins are high enough that the cattle ranchers can just casually absorb a threefold cost increase? Clearly they're eating the loss, because if they passed those costs onwards in the chain there'd certainly be huge economic consequences, as I said, and you wouldn't have felt the need to try and correct my premise. Anyway, I'd like to visit this world of yours, though only if you'd be buying the meals.
> Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days.
This is what happens when one tries to create a narrative from DoT statistics.
The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.
Once you have the logs processed into boards, then you use trucks to carry those boards to various short-haul destinations, where some of the boards are further processed into fence pickets and bird houses and old-timey sign posts that Roadrunner can inadvertently spin around so Wile E ends up taking a completely wrong turn. All of that stuff then goes to storefronts and warehouses (also short-haul) and as a result, the short-haul tonnage can count twice, three times, or even more, depending on just how many steps are being taken between "tree" and "birdhouse".
> Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways
Which is great along inland waterways, but if you're not located along them, you're probably using rail to get the bulk goods to the shipyard.
Note that the inverse situation is common at west coast ports, with short haul rail lines running to intermodal facilities so things can be loaded onto trucks for long haul. The cost of transloading to domestic containers often dominates keeping it on rails.
> The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.
Around here the timber arrives at the railyard by truck and aggregates are usually mined and transported locally, which is truck heavy. Grain is also majority truck these days from the BTS stats I can see, but basic materials isn't my industry.
Regardless, ton-miles aren't doubled counted. It's one ton, transported one mile. If rail took freight that extra distance, it'd get the same share (subject to all the usual caveats of industry numbers).
Cargo ships beat everything hands down if there's a port close to your origin and destination, and lots of water in between.
I don't think this is true in Europe. Certainly in the UK, passenger rail volume since the 2010s has set records higher than in any previous years, exceeding numbers that were last seen before WW2. Today there are fewer miles of track than there were in that era, but modern signalling technology allows more trains to operate safely on the same tracks, and modern trains run much faster on average.
As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.
It's also that rail tends to be more competitive for long haul traffic, and the US operators have big trans-continental freight networks well suited to that. In Europe there's a sharp drop off in modal share as freight crosses borders. Each national railway operator is in practice fiercely protective of its own turf, and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. So in practice cross-border freight is largely done with trucks instead.
Despite the EU commission wanting to get some competition going on the rails and better interoperability requirements etc etc. for at least the past 30 years, the operators are still in the "discussion about preparing to setup a committee to discuss interoperability" phase.
Europe also has far more freight-friendly waterways. US rail is designed for dirt-cheap bulk transport for things like coal and grain. In most of Europe that's done by barge - but US geography doesn't really allow for that.
The tolerances are just a bit tighter, the risks and liabilities are higher, and the workforce just isn't "there" - this is from a time when rail was a huge money earner and could afford to employ a huge number of people. Today? Not so much, pretty much anywhere in the World.
I’d guess that overseas modern non-high speed trains could deal with it. The passengers might not put up with it though.
Sure, but they do it with big machines that ride down the rails now instead of lining up thousands of men with sledge hammers.
So what? I'd there isn't a machine, you build one.
Large industries like mining and shipping and the military don't just stop because they can't buy a needed item off the shelf because there isn't a market for it. They build stuff all the time.
I worked in a factory for a few years, and can tell you that if industries followed your "can't do" attitude, commerce would stop.
Let’s say you have a problem and the only way to solve it is with a thingamabob. The thingamabob doesn’t exist, so you need to make the first one. Unknown to everyone, the military, the O&G/mining industry, and the rail industries all try to build one at the same time. Do you think they all cost the same? What about the time to design and build them?
The oil and gas people will call up some machinists and engineers the same day. Time is money and they need the problem solved. It doesn’t need to look pretty. I don’t think anyone would disagree that they would be the first with a thingamabob. First one might break, they’d get Bob on a Cessna from the nearest machine shop with a replacement.
The military would have some meetings, which would spawn more meetings, and eventually put out some requests for proposals. They’d review the proposals and ten years later they’d have their thingamabob. No doubt it would be the most expensive.
The rail industry… the modern, passenger rail industry in wealthy western countries? There might be proposals, or designs or prototypes with large amounts of money spent, but I think it is reasonable to say the thingamabob would never actually be built and used. Look at CAHSR or Stuttgart 21 or Turin-Lyon.
That's not a "change gauge for a 100-wagon freight train" scale operation, and it's not "off the shelf" tech, but we're fairly close I think?
I'm not a train guy, but I'm pretty sure the machine that lifts the track up and allows them to swap out the ties is like 95% of what would be needed for a gauge changing machine.
Well, back then the US had freshly banned slavery, so there was an ample workforce that could be hired for dirt cheap.
The Soviets and the Wehrmacht pulled off similar feats in WW2, but back then the rails and sleepers didn't have to be built to last many decades, so in addition to loads upon loads of forced labor from concentration camps and gulags, the work effort was massively reduced because easier technology could be used.
The Days They Changed the Gauge (1966) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8371773 (2014, 15 comments)
And a related discussion:
Why BART uses a nonstandard broad gauge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031131 (2022, 253 comments)
The BART discussion was where I first learned about the North American 2-day gauge change. A truly inspiring feat for so many engineers to come together across such a large amount of land area to Make It Happen.
One such oddball is the TTC subway/streetcar gauge of 1495 mm in Toronto, Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto-gauge_railways
I also don't know where you're getting 125kV from. Many trains throughout the world use 25kV, especially high-speed ones (actually high speed, like 200+km/h), but BART uses 1000V, which is closer to a typical subway system.
[0]: https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/1410829/report-shows-that-cha...
[1]: https://api.hankeikkuna.fi/asiakirjat/697c1f25-332b-40ed-9d6...
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.
You're right about switches though – if you keep the rest of the switch geometry (angle, radius) the same (and to some extent you have to if you want to keep existing speeds across switches), the large track gauge alone will make the switch somewhat longer, which at least in complex stations with huge clusters of switches (like e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@50.1039604,8.6563677,197m/data=...) could potentially cause some headaches.
That's of course completely impossible but one can dream.
Ideally you would want to do this all over Europe.
I rode these kind of trains in multiple countries and continents and there's nothing uncomfortable about them.
Why do you say that?
I agree that they're fine in countries with larger bridges and tunnels -- Amtrak's Superliners are palatial in size -- but not for us. (Except probably for the Channel Tunnel rail link, which is built to French gauge).
I was not aware that the UK has a different gauge than Europe and US.
There's a surprising amount of global variation as much of this stuff wasn't standardised until after most railways were built. AIUI that's even true in the US, where the routes in the West can often take double-stacked containers and Amtrak's Superliners, and further East they often can't.
[0]: https://rfg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Loading-Gauge....
I think bridge heights are the bigger problem here
At almost every election before this version of Labour got in, the Tories would promise all sorts of rail projects then immediately cancel them after the election.
One project was a goods "spine" (all projects were "spines" at this point), that invovled improving the loading guage from Southampton upwards.
For routes where this happened I don't see why we couldn't upgrade the stations to a bigger loading guage and have double decker trains.
I've noticed all the bridges we get on stations these days are much higher.
I don't know if detailed guage maps exist - it would be interesting to know how many bridges and tunnels stand in the way of reguaging on various routes.
The costs would be high and the benefits negligible. Where more capacity is required, it's typically easier to lengthen existing trains, or run more trains, than to go adapting stations and building new unique double-decker trains that are only going to be compatible with a specific line.
And, as mentioned elsewhere, double-deckers have a big disadvantage in lengthening dwell times (due to less doors per passenger), which could result in slower services.
Sounds like a classic case of "let's not make a future upgrade impossible". The material cost itself is only a small part of the total, so making the new bridges slightly higher is a rounding error in your budget. However, you're saving many millions if there were ever a full-line upgrade in the future, as you no longer need to do a full bridge replacement during that upgrade.
As long as there is even the vaguest plan of an upgrade at some point in the future it makes sense to adhere to the new standard, just in case. It's the no-regret option.
It sure is standardized; the problem is that there are so many standards to choose from!
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loading_gauge for an overview.
Britain is a bit special, in that as the first country to have extensive rail infrastructure, it also has the smallest loading gauges around. Later built railway networks tend to have bigger loading gauges.
Those are not nice things. Double decker trains take longer to load/unload than regular trains for only a small increase in capacity. Single deck trains can make more stops in the same amount of time thus serving more people, or they can take less time in the stops thus getting people where they want to be faster. Time is important to humans, anyone who says slow down to others has no idea how they live or where their needs are. If you want to slow down and smell roses that is fine: go to a park and do so - meanwhile a lot of people need less time on transit so they get more time at home with their kids (or whatever else they do in life)
Larger loading gauges are a good things for a lot of reasons, but the ability to run double decker trains is not one of them.
If the size of your blocks are an issue, then that is a problem worth solving. If you are can't fit in all those trains, then you need to build more track not try to compromise. Yes track is expensive, but if you can't fit all the trains then the passenger volume is high enough to support it. This likely requires better operations though and some people see a loss of their direct train and don't see how a fast (fast is critical!) transfer is overall better for them.
That might be the case in very controlled environments such as a subway network, but in other, more heterogeneous environments GoA 4 is not there yet.
So little actual difference.
It is trivial to disable and no so easy to fix, especially if Russia has a good supply of drones and missiles (which is the actual issue for them as we have seen in Ukraine).
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.
They tried, but weren't able to defeat them completely; a deal / armistice was made in the end.
> Finland lost 12% of its land area, 20% of its industrial capacity, its second largest city, Vyborg, and the ice-free port of Liinakhamari
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.
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/infrastructu...
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torne%C3%A5%E2%80%93Haparanda-...
If you are not doing all of this at once, this likely isn't worth it.
If they build new lines next to existing ones, they need to touch all that stuff anyway. No point in replicating old systems.
The idea is simple. Ensuring everything is smooth and safe = cost multiplier.
You can't announce migration if you haven't decided you plan to migrate...
https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=gauge&lat=62.774837258...
Though I have to say, that's not exactly the best UI. Not sure what the solution is OTOH, it's certainly not useful to clutter up the map when zoomed out either.
It makes more sense for islands such as Ireland to retain their old gauge.
Probably more to do with the fact that the first train in Spain was build in Cuba
bast copy of the Subercase report I could find: [1] https://www.agrupament.cat/documents/Informe%20Subercase.pdf
Given that France invaded Spain in 1807, the military made it necessary to have a different gauge from France. Not only that, the train by the coast was also forbidden in some places as a naval bombardment could disrupt communications in case of war.
Spain has lots of mountains with a large plateau over 700 meters high and the coast is usually way lower so it makes sense to transport things by the coast.
Ireland's was kind of an accident; it wasn't even a case of retaining an old gauge as such; it's just that a different gauge won, and, being an island, this didn't matter. The first railway in Ireland was built in 1831 and was what's now called standard gauge. There were a bunch of competing companies, using standard gauge, 1600mm, and various other things. It happens that the two that won both used 1600mm rail, and while that first line from 1831 still largely exists, it was ripped up and replaced with 1600mm over a century ago.
Britain was exactly the same, except that it happened that standard gauge eventually won and all the other stuff (with the exception of one or two narrow gauge lines, I think) was ultimately replaced or retired.
Of course, both being islands, in a way the gauge didn't _really_ matter. It matters more in continental Europe, because you have cross-border lines.
Soon, you might go from London to Köln without switching trains!
I kinda expected India and Britain to use the same gauge, and was a bit surprised.
Also, what's going on in Australia?
No. There was some small lines in Scotland using the same gauge as India, but Britain had a bunch of different gauges and eventually standardized on 1435mm ("standard gauge") as that was the most common one.
I don't recall where I read it, but IIRC there was some motivation that they wanted a broader gauge for India because they were afraid cars would topple over during storms. Or something like that.
> Also, what's going on in Australia?
Each territory built its own railway, with no thought about eventually building a cohesive continental network. In some cases narrow gauge was chosen because it was thought to be marginally cheaper than standard gauge.
The same happens with the electricity grid, even though it is connected to France, it has very small capacity.
We did such things in the US in month long long ago.
Which they are, as even a quick search would have shown.
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.
It's a tradeoff and worthy of deliberation.
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.
Unloading to new trains carry the same problems; expensive, time consuming, and make for excellent targets. Logistics are the least interesting part of war for most people, but are one of, if not the most, important part.
There's no defensive reason for this other than in the cabinet talks.
First of all it's not just so easy to destroy infrastructure in a way that can't be rebuilt quickly; thousands of miles of train tracks would be difficult to destroy. This is happening all over Ukraine.
Second, blowing up your own country's rail infrastructure means you can't use it, either, which means you lose an advantage you have that your trains can move on your rails but your enemy's cannot.
Finnish rail roads are mostly north-south bound (or west of Helsinki) which are not helpful to Russian advances. The only way for them to transport weaponry would be through east-west bound (near the border) and there isn't many. It's easy to take such out and they would not impact our infrastructure at all as they're not heavily used (if at all since eastern part of Finland is economically the weakest link anyway).
It's quick and easy in the end to destroy. Rebuilding them under artillery fire isn't easy.
Russians aren't stupid, they know that the enemy will try to destroy the tracks when retreating, so they train to fix/bypass the problems quickly.
That includes some transportable improvised bridges ready for deployment.
I assume that changing the gauge also affects other related equipment such as signaling and such, which would make rebuilding much harder.
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.
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.
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
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.
While a downshift if usually much esier since a smaller gauge simply fits inside the larger one so all bridges and tunnels are wide enough by definition.
Why do you say that?
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.
But 89mm is probably too small a margin for that to work.
> The government is expected to make the final decision by July 2027, with construction starting around 2032.
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.)
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?
Why are wider inter-track requiring larger curves? It should be the same, but with better lateral stability.
Intesting times.
thih9•6mo 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?
russellbeattie•6mo ago
Check back in in a few years and all your questions will be answered.
gspr•6mo ago
anticodon•6mo 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.
stuaxo•6mo ago
I thought this is a project for a new railway, not reguaging existing track ?
concerned_user•6mo ago
Sloowms•6mo ago
greggsy•6mo ago
concerned_user•6mo ago
cromulent•6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica#Project_progress
anticodon•6mo ago
But billions of euros has already been spent.
ceejayoz•6mo ago
I imagine you’re looking for the subheadings titled “completed in 2015” and “construction (2017-present)” though.
anticodon•6mo ago
Yes, I understand very well that "research" is a pipe, where you put billions of euros in one end, and get stack of papers on the other end. And somebody becomes rich in the process. Sapienti sat.
rmind•6mo ago
It's worth noting that the non-HS standard gauge (part of Rail Baltica I) between Poland and Lithuania (up to Šeštokai Intermodal Terminal) was completed back in 2015. The freight trains have been operating on this line all the time.
tekla•6mo ago
rmind•6mo ago
Let's keep in mind that it's not just standard gauge track. It's a high-speed rail project (200-250 km/h) and, for any country, it takes time to build such a huge infrastructure.
euroderf•6mo ago
hapidjus•6mo ago
cluckindan•6mo ago
pjerem•6mo ago
Wheels are anyway wearing parts and are to be changed periodically.
BTW, I'm just speculating out loud.
Sharlin•6mo ago
Adjustable-gauge rolling stock has also been ruled out as incompatible with the Finnish climate.
The most (only?) feasible way to do it is to “simply” build entirely new standard-gauge track next to existing track (and then possibly start upgrading the latter too at some point in the future).
greatpatton•6mo ago
janfoeh•6mo ago
Sharlin•6mo ago
vincnetas•6mo ago
When engineers asked should we do the rails same width like in europe or wider, the answer they got from tzar was "Нахуй шире"
literal translation "wider by length of dick, but meaning "why the fuck we need wider"
- В Европе ширина колеи 1435 миллиметров. Нам делать так же или шире? - Нахуй шире, - ответил император.
alexey-salmin•6mo ago
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/580-the-legend-of-the-tsar...
nottorp•6mo ago
Stevvo•6mo ago
yevgeby•6mo ago
andriamanitra•6mo ago
[1] https://yle.fi/a/74-20161793
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki%E2%80%93Tallinn_Tunne...
pjc50•6mo ago
The subtext is not economic: it's "in the event of being invaded by Russia, can we minimize the delays in moving NATO materiel by rail to the front while denying Russia equally easy access to the rails".
ExoticPearTree•6mo ago
pjc50•6mo ago
IAmBroom•6mo ago
The silver lining in the horrific invasion of Ukraine is that the Russian bear's belly is not just exposed, but raw from shaving nicks.
Granted, it still takes a lot to kill a bear - but the West only wants deterrence, not occupation of Russia.
andriamanitra•6mo ago
arnsholt•6mo ago
andriamanitra•6mo ago
bluGill•6mo ago
lukan•6mo ago
And if there isn't a war, the benefits of a interconnected and integrated european railwail network are potentially huge. 300 km/h trains connecting Finnland with Spain with no delay or bumps? That would be something.
pjc50•6mo ago
Bit tricky this: either you cross the Baltic by ferry and resume at Tallinn, or you have to go a long way round north from Helsinki and come down again through Sweden, across Oresund and through Denmark.
Akronymus•6mo ago
lukan•6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge
And more tunnels are getting build.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_fixed_link
Akronymus•6mo ago
yencabulator•6mo ago
lukan•6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge
yencabulator•6mo ago
I wouldn't generalize from that to "nobody could destroy a bridge".
lukan•6mo ago
Moving goalposts?
"That bridge is going to be incredibly easy to destroy"
Of course bridges can be destroyed. Also Ukraine would have succeded by now, if it really would have changed the war and justify the efforts.
(It doesn't anymore, since russia has the land train connections)
But it really ain't "incredibly easy", if that bridge is guarded. The failed attempts document as much - and Ukraine knows how to destroy things by now.
lukan•6mo ago
All nice concepts. All quite expensive obviously.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/03/08/will-a-bridge-acros...
https://ferryshippingnews.com/aland-islands-tunnel-is-back-o...
yencabulator•6mo ago
Have you seen a map of the region?
Geee•6mo ago
andriamanitra•6mo ago
euroderf•6mo ago
Discussions of a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel suggest that Finland would at least lay European gauge tracks to Espoo and Helsinki-Vantaa airport, and maybe also to Tampere.
inglor_cz•6mo ago
It would also enable high-speed services from Finland to Central Europe - Rail Baltica to Tallinn is currently being built, so Helsinki-Warsaw could be a plausible connection, doable in less than 8 hours. (More than ideal, but trains that run for 8 hours from one end of their journey to another are commonplace in Central Europe.)
Al-Khwarizmi•6mo 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.
RileyJames•6mo ago
Meanwhile here in Australia our “fast rail” trains go 160km/h. Unless it’s over 32 degrees, then they slow down. And if it hits 36 degrees they slow down even more (90km/h)
And it gets that hot here a lot…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V/Line_VLocity
https://www.vline.com.au/heat
john-h-k•6mo ago
detaro•6mo ago
Akronymus•6mo ago
As an austrian, I am amused.
dotancohen•6mo ago
Akronymus•6mo ago
But austria and australia regularily exchange mail that got sent to the wrong country.
Al-Khwarizmi•6mo ago
I suppose it's difficult to make that mistake because plane tickets are to cities, not countries as a whole.
As a real story, I knew a guy who had a B&B near a beach called San Francisco, in Spain, and he regularly had to cancel bookings from people who thought it was in the US city of the same name, though :)
thih9•6mo ago
https://simpleflying.com/ameican-airlines-passenger-flies-si...
john-h-k•6mo ago
LargoLasskhyfv•6mo ago
And/or build them like this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Schienenauszugsvorrichtu... ,
or this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:SchienenauszugMitLzb.jpg ,
or this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feste_Fahrbahn#/media/Datei:Oe...
It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breather_switch
danielovichdk•6mo ago
Al-Khwarizmi•6mo ago
As an armchair expert, I think it turned out badly because they had to develop cutting-edge technology (no trains with that top speed and support for gauge change existed before, and it also has other quirks, like being uncommonly wide to support five seats per row) but, at the same time, make it very cheap (the project started in the context of harsh austerity in the years after the financial crisis, with PIGS accused of overspending, etc.). They promised too much for the budget and ended up delivering a half-baked train. At the beginning, a year ago, it was a disaster (lots of incidents with trains stopping mid-way, etc.), now they seem to be ironing out the problems and things are getting better but they're still much more unreliable than other trains.
I hope at least the lessons learned help towards making a better model in the future.
stuaxo•6mo ago
jabl•6mo 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.
ExoticPearTree•6mo ago
xattt•6mo ago
ExoticPearTree•6mo ago
I have this feeling that Finland's railway tracks are not set in concrete at street level ;)
iggldiggl•6mo ago
ExoticPearTree•6mo ago
I imagine running a machine in reverse, removing the track and changing sleepers and one moving forward at the same time installing the new track only. Or have one remove the old sleepers and track and and another one installing new sleepers and track (imagine building new track kind of operation).
iggldiggl•6mo ago
So repeats of the famous 19th century gauge change by converting large swathes of the network in just a few days (thousands of miles of track as in the US in 1886, or even just the 177 miles west of Exeter in the UK in 1892) remain rather unlikely.
xattt•6mo ago
Getting to the sleepers would take weeks of jackhammering plus more time to repour the concrete.
bluGill•6mo ago
I could personally switch a track guage - but it would be multiple days per km of track switched, if you trained me on how to do this I could do it much faster (I have no idea how much faster, but faster). Train a lot of people like me and it is faster. Or you could buy machines.
We also need to switch all the train wheels, again, not hard - but not something an untrained person can do quickly.
Most likely a large part of the process is finding other railroads around the world that have the needed equipment that will let them borrow it for a few months (most of which time spent in shipping not using the machines.) there are a lot of railroads with old machines they keep for emergency use that can be pressed into use. There are railroads thinking about buying a new machine that would make the order now (with the options Finland needs) if Finland contributes on the understanding Finland gets it for a few months...
inglor_cz•6mo ago
German soldiers re-gauged Soviet railways on a very short notice too when Barbarossa started.
mmooss•6mo ago
inglor_cz•6mo ago
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dayaen...
As you can see, the entire shape of the sleeper is adapted to the expected distance between rails.
In contrast, a wooden sleeper is just a straight log with no pre-made bumps for rails.
Qwertious•6mo ago
As the Finns will presumably not permit Russia to do prep work on the rails in advance of their invasion, they'll have to do all that prep work after the invasion. The article doesn't say how long that two years of prep would actually take if needed ASAP, but if it would take a month then the Finns would have a huge boon.
rsynnott•6mo 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).
padjo•6mo ago
rsynnott•6mo ago
marcthe12•6mo ago
iggldiggl•6mo ago
It was also a time when railways used wooden sleepers, so you could simply drill new holes at the new track gauge for moving the rail fasteners, thereby minimising the work required for changing the gauge, at least on the plain line, switches and crossings excepted.
Plus it was a time when a lot more manpower for that kind of massive manual work was available, plus railways were the dominant transport mode and could actually commandeer that kind of manpower.
aziaziazi•6mo ago
That article has a short paragraph mentioning it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44033310
dotancohen•6mo ago
jillesvangurp•6mo 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.
bluGill•6mo ago
jillesvangurp•6mo ago
bluGill•6mo ago
There are a lot of options and I expect those planning this to look into all the details to figure out what they can do.