Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge | Hacker News Reader

Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

yle.fi

461 pointsaxelfontaine446 comments

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.

To be fair, if we imagine a future in which this did happen, the start would also look like this, so who knows.

>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.

One of the main goals of this is to not have the russian gauge available in case russians attack, so that logistics deeper into Finland cant happen easily with the same train, so backwards compatability is not desired.

It's not like this results in a categorical difference in difficulty. Gauge switching infrastructure is common at borders. Yeah stopping and switching is slower than driving right through but it's not the end of the world in the long tail of military logistics.

Russian military logistics _heavily_ depend on trains, everything that can go on a train, does so. Flight and vehicle stuff is mostly an afterthought.

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.

Another fun note about Russian logistics, they aren't palletized or mechanized. Thought being that cranes don't look good in parades. The train side seems smart or at least interesting, the pallets incredibly dumb.

https://x.com/TrentTelenko/status/1507056013245128716

Why invest in forklifts, container infrastructure etc. if your military has a near-endless supply of uneducated conscripts you can order to shuffle around shells and other items?

(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.)

“ endless supply of uneducated conscripts “

Now you’re just being silly.

Regardless of how much education they have - they are treated as uneducated.

This is a debunked post I think.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1507056013245128716.html

Your cite?

i dont believe it is.

Trent and a lot of Ukranian war commentators have a habit of saying $X is catastrophic for the Russians (this is the worst on YouTube). Then those catastrophic things don't come to pass.

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.

Transformers are not very hard to replace or make though. All they are is some copper wound around iron. It will just be some added frustration and annoyance for them but no gamechanger. If they start doing it a lot Russia will just build a bigger electrical workforce and more backstock. They have plenty of people and the authorianism to make them do whatever they want. It's just a pissing contest. Russia did lots of cyberattacks on the Ukrainian electrical network in the years before the invasion. Didn't do anything either but send a message.

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.

Do you mean stuxnet? That was a cyber attack, natanz was a blackout caused by a blast/explosion IIRC.

Natanz was the site of the facility targeted by stuxnet.

https://www.nti.org/education-center/facilities/natanz-enric...

Russia is importing shells from North Korea. Transformers are more complex than you give them credit for, and Russia has a very limited ability to manufacture anything, it would make a difference.

Logical explanation, there are better alternative targets. (Supply of deep strike is finite, one must prioritise)

Yeah sure, but it doesn't take away from the fact that the Russians do not use pallets for logistics and therefore struggle with logistics as a result.

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.

Crippling the Russian train system would be very much worth it. Russia would have to switch to limited diesel locomotives, and it would really hurt regular civilian logistics in those areas.

Compare this to the completely bonkers logistics of the US Military: https://youtu.be/iIpPuJ_r8Xg

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

Well yes but the US usually fights in faraway places to bring freedom (though the only thing they manage to 'liberate' is oil, see how Afghanistan and Iraq turned into hellholes as soon as they turned their backs)

Russia just likes to kill the shit out of their neighbours which is a lot easier logistically.

And when most of their neighbours historically use the same rail gauge, it's a lot easier too :D

Gauge switching requires trains outfitted with specialized axles (increasing the cost to invade), requires trains to stop (increasing the train's vulnerability to attack), and requires switching stations which themselves are juicy targets and can't be repaired nearly as trivially as an ordinary length of rail.

It adds time for each train though.

And if you're Russia wanting to invade Europe, it's better to do the Gauge switching right near your own border rather than on the far side of Finland. So while this may make it harder to invade Finland, it makes it easier to invade Europe as a whole.

This. I am struggling to see how this is anything other than posturing by politicians. It’s hard to imagine this is strategy devised by military leaders.

The far side of Finland? That’s the Baltic Sea. Sure, there’s a little bit of Sweden, but it’s so far north that there isn’t much rail infrastructure there - certainly little enough that it could quickly be destroyed at the beginning of a war.

If the supply line is blown up at the beginning of the war then what was the point of switching gauges.

The stated reason for the gauge change is "to remove technical obstacles to transporting troops and goods between Finland, Sweden and Norway".

Those few connections in the sparse north of the country are the entire point.

The objective they try to achieve is not to slow down Russia's invasion into Europe, but to stop them at the border by being able to move assets throughout Europe relatively quickly. If they gain a proper foothold and full access to "euro gauge" rails, it's a different fight.

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.

But if the Spanish can muster dual gauge trains, what's to prevent the Russians from doing the same? Or is the Finnish gauge a state secret?

The difference between Finnish and Russian gauge is 4mm

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

What is the acceptable tolerance? It doesn't sound like a huge engineering effort to design a boogie compatible with both without requiring switching.

Yes, the acceptable tolerance is -4mm+7mm.

Where? Finland specifically, or elsewhere? Both my local tram system in Germany as well as DB as the national infrastructure operator in Germany have construction tolerances of only +/- 2 mm. Maintenance tolerances on the other hand can be quite a bit larger, at least in the plus direction (on the order of 15/20/25 mm).

Sure, but thats Germans. I'm surprised it isn't specc'd in 10ths.

They should've specced 1435mm±410µm, with no broadening at curves.

I just wish the Germans would be as accurate with their train schedules as they are with their rail gauge tolerances :D

Train tracks are normally not precise to within 4mm anyway, and wheels are wide enough to tolerate that.

> Train tracks are normally not precise to within 4mm anyway

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.

I obviously don't have a in depth knowledge of Finnish rail, but have you ever looked at rail in the US? I can show you tracks with completely missing ties. Tracks that move vertically by a foot when the train goes over them. Tracks that visually snake all over the place. The difference is made by slowing down the train. Derailment at 3 mph rarely matters. The biggest risk is the conductor doesn't know it happened & continues to drag the car along the tracks

Sure, but even in the US that infrastructure state is usually only found on minor branch lines (shortlines), not on the main lines.

There used to be a St.Pete-Helsinki high-speed train before the war, Allegro. It was built with bogies for a 1522mm gauge.

First sentence from the article: The Finnish government has announced the conversion of its rail network from Russian gauge (1,524 mm) to European standard (1,435 mm).

1524 - 1435 = 89

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railway...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-gauge_railway

So "closer to 10cm" then

Clearly not "doable", without guage changing bogies.

The really annoying thing is that it's too close for "simple" dual gauge rails (e.g. 1435 + 1000); 1435 + 1524 is possible and in fact exists (e.g. the one single SE-FI railway bridge that exists is dual guage: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=gauge&lat=65.8273204537081...), but AFAIK it's expensive because the mounts interfere and need to be quite custom.

That bridge is 4-rail, not 3-rail

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)

Bleh, but kinda confirms my point too. I do think there are some 3-rail setups in other border regions though? I should check… then again it doesn't matter that much if it's 3 or 4.

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.

> what's to prevent

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.

Also:

> what's to prevent

Russian lack of logistical planning.

I would also imagine that large-scale retrofitting of traincars with variable gauge adaptations is something that would be hard for foreign intelligence services (including the Finnish one to miss) - and would then serve as a signal that Russia is indeed preparing for an invasion.

It's less about what the Russians can do and more about how fast European and NATO countries can move assets to a potential invasion front line; as it stands, they're slowed down at the borders needing to switch to the different gauges.

> One of the main goals of this is to not have the russian gauge available in case russians attack

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?

Even if Russia's conquest of Ukraine were to end tomorrow, they would take a few years to recover before mounting their next offensive. And Finland isn't first in line on their list of next invasion targets, that would be either Georgia, Moldova, or the Baltics.

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.

Russia can't just attack anywhere it wants to. Putin is not Kim Il-sung, he can't count on any order to be blindly obeyed. It took years of propaganda, unfortunately armed with a couple of actually good points (mostly supplied by the neonazi nationalist wing in Ukraine, who wanted a war), before he could try actually invading. He had to walk a dangerous game with his own, in particular with his own neonazi supporter Prigozhin, who could easily have come up on top in their inevitable conflict.

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.

As you suggest, Russia's invasion of Ukraine was bolstered by Russian sympathizers in the east. Every country bordering Russia is incentivized to break free of any sort of alignment with Russia in order to reduce the threat of local insurgency which will aid Russia in its invasion. For example, the Baltic countries removing Russian from their list of official languages, in addition to decoupling from the Russian power grid. There are a lot of steps to be taken, and a lot of them will take decades. Fortunately, Russia's capacity to wage war measured against their number of potential targets means that it would take them decades to reconquer it all, assuming Europe steps up to fund the defense. Train gauge alignment is just one of many steps towards this end, and the sooner the better.

The anti-Russian policies in the Baltics are dumb, they provide Putin with a good point to use in his propaganda, which is infinitely more useful to him than any railroad on foreign soil.

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.

> The anti-Russian policies in the Baltics are dumb, they provide Putin with a good point to use in his propaganda

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.

What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.

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.

> What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.

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.

> 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.

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.

Given the ample reporting of Russian speakers in places like Odesa switching to speaking in Ukrainian as a result of the 2022 invasion to distance themselves from Russia, or the difficulty the Russian occupiers of Ukraine has had in finding people willing to work for them, or the fact that the current president of Ukraine is himself a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, or the fact that in the 1991 referendum, a majority of people in every Ukrainian oblast (including Crimea!) supported being a part of Ukraine rather than Russia, I don't think it's that hard to say what the general appetite of Russian-speaking Ukrainians becoming part of Russia is.

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.)

But, similarly, don't confuse cultural identity with political one. That is really the crux of the issue here - self-identifying as Ukrainian or as Russian is very much a political question in Ukraine, and has been since their independence. This is also why you have this weird situation where several prominent Ukrainian military commanders and politicians have close direct relatives in Russia who are pro-war politicians there and who often were themselves born in Ukraine (or, conversely, the Ukrainian ones were born in Russia). So somebody may be Russian not just linguistically but culturally and ethnically as well, be born and raised in Russia, and still self-identify as Ukrainian today and speak the language solely as a marker of their chosen affiliation. And because it is a political identity in those cases, it can be very fluid - i.e. those very same people might be ones who have voted for Yanukovich 15 years ago precisely because he was seen as pro-Russian-language.

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.

Said brainwashing can still be more or less effective depending on how much material it can build upon.

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.

"Removing Russian from their list of official languages"? It was never an official language in the first place.

In the distant past of the 1990s, it was.

Right, under Soviet military occupation.

There was no military occupation of Finland in the 1990s.

A was referring to the Baltic countries, as per the comment from @kibwen above.

Sorry, my bad.

"Do you have Russian soldiers in Finland?" "Yes, hundreds of thousands" "Where are they stationed?" "Along the border, six feet deep".

It was the case during the Soviet occupation and briefly during the transitional period, but otherwise - no, it wasn't. For example, in 1990, Latvia simply restored its 1922 constitution (still in effect today, although with some amendments) which enacted Latvian as the sole official language. This has also been the case with Lithuanian and Estonian constitutions, respectively.

I think this overstates the challenges, especially given the last 10+ years of despots doing things they shouldn't just be able to do. Waking up one day to find that the US has invaded Canada is now a non-negligible possibility.

I think they are up to the challenge of whipping up some BS casus belli and scaring would-be protesters into submission.

>"Meanwhile, it increases the costs on Russia and slows their advance. It's a win no matter what."

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.

Fortunately, a country can pursue many things simultaneously, which is often more generally effective than pursuing a single thing to the detriment of all others, thanks to diminishing returns.

>"...than pursuing a single thing..."

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.

Russia can however win the US dithering, western Europe being scared of cruise missile strikes while their propagandists ask if it's worth dying for a few little towns.

We need to have resolve!

> Russia can not win conventional war with NATO

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.

there are economic benefits to closer integration with the EU that the weapons would not provide.

Given the disaster that is the Ukrainian invasion, this doesn't really hold true. As long as leadership is OK with a total logistical clusterfuck, you don't need to worry about "years to recover" for your next offensive. The next offensive starts today. You can figure out the details as you go.

> that would be either Georgia, Moldova, or the Baltics.

Or Kazakstan, although China might object there.

Like most such things, it's probably mostly symbolic, so politicians can say they're doing something in defiance of Russia (which is a very popular thing to do in Finland right now, or most of the west for that matter). I guess they'll back down on it when by 2032, everyone realizes it doesn't matter since wars will be fought with small autonomous drones and any railroad would be sabotaged in an instant.

What kind of ranges are you expecting from these small drones so logistics suddenly doesn’t matter? Even if something can hypothetically travel thousands of miles, designing disposable weapons with that kind of range has a real cost.

Sure, logistics matter. I'm sure Russian-gauge railroads in Finland would be mildly convenient for invading Sweden, provided you can first invade and utterly defeat Finland quickly enough that the railways survive.

But if Putin could do that (he can't), railway gauges would be the least of our worries.

So the drone bit was a non sequitur.

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.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to make a “train moat” by disconnecting rails from Russia? Or would they run the trains on dirt for a mile and re attach?

Building temporary bridges in wartime is pretty normal.

Always loved going over the border from France as a kid and they would lift the whole train up and slide the old wheels out and put the new ones in and off you go!

Or they will start with a few of the most important lines that connect the countries and ports.

That was the plan, one rail that can go from somewhere in Finland all the way to central Europe without stopping to change rail gauges.

See also: Rail Baltica

These projects are sloooooooow

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.

Crazy thing is, I don't live in Finland yet this description could describe our situation almost identically as well. And I can think of yet _another_ place on Earth with a similar situation.

Fear of foreign invasion is also why the Soviet Union invaded during the Winter War ("Greater Finland" irredentism was a thing, and St Petersburg was militarily exposed).

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.

Fear is why Finland allied with the Nazis.

... or maybe because Fins got invaded by Soviets.

They didnt stop being allied to the Nazis after the winter war was over. Fear maintained that alliance.

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.

> Just like fear of "greater finland" made the Soviets invade in the first place.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_Mainila

No. The closest living analog to the Nazis today is our allies in Israel and like the Nazis they arent shy about endless expansionism for the sake of creating lebensraum for their ubermensch. Theyre not very shy about the holocaust theyre committing either.

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.

> Russia never went on an extermination drive in order to create an ethnically pure ethnostate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide

> Russia never went on an extermination drive in order to create an ethnically pure ethnostate.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

Technically I'd prefer to be living in a newbuild in Mariupol paying taxes to a different government rather than having the Israeli army drop bombs on my head and starving my entire family until we are all dead.

Small distinction to you perhaps, but to me it's a bit more than just "technical".

> Just like fear of "greater finland" made the Soviets invade in the first place.

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.

When speaking to Americans, I explain the wartime co-operation between Finland and Germany as, "The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my 'friend', but we can do business."

I'd go with "Otherwise they would have attacked us also, and we definitely couldn't afford a war on two fronts."

One is the biggest country on the planet, with 150 million people.

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 is the same as Iraq being a realistic threat against the US.

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.

It's such a mystery why all neighbours of Russia hate Russia and Russians.

If only there was a reason for this.

Experience.

I can name about 8 who dont. The rest all belong to or tried to join a military bloc which helped rape Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan for no particular reason other than because the gang boss demanded it.

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.

> The rest all belong to or tried to join a military bloc which helped rape Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan for no particular reason other than because the gang boss demanded it.

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 promise to Ukraine was that they are going to be protected by their chosen gang rather than be cynically used to try and take down a rival gang.

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.

Ukraine wasn't in NATO and NATO members Baltics have not been attacked, even though they're a lot smaller and more vulnerable

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).

Ironically this slur is only ever used by imperialists who support the empire they live under.

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.

Hate? No.

Wary? Yes.

Seems Necessary given current circumstances.

(After peace comes, and enough time passes, someday, we will be friends again)

Which 27 million deaths? Finland never had 27 million inhabitants.

The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in WW2. It was a minor detail you swept under the carpet in your comment.

> The other one is about 300 sqkm with 5 million people.

You've missed a few significant figures there, Finland's area is: 338145 km2

No, fear is not why Soviet Union allayed with Nazis. Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was agreement in which Nazis and Soviets divided central/eastern Europe between them. They even had join parade after conquering Poland in Brest (Brześć). And yes, they ware allied.

They were fighting Japan at the time, were unable to fight a war on two fronts and Britain had at that point chosen to follow a strategy of appeasement towards the Nazis.

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?

First of all this were USSR-Japan skirmishes not war, second they did not have to worry about Japan as was shown by Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941, third if they were worried about Japan then "spending" army on invasion of Poland, Finland, Baltics, Bessarabia were counter productive, fourthly at the time of Ribentrop Molotov pact Britain ceased following appeasement strategy as shown by declaring war to Germany at 3-rd of September 1939 as fulfillment of security guarantees given to Poland in March of 1939.

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.

>First of all this were USSR-Japan skirmishes not war, second they did not have to worry about Japan as was shown by Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941

...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.

My only surprise is that they haven't already converted. It's not just about military aspects of an invasion, it's also about ease of deportation and ethnic substitution that would have to be expected afterwards in case of a Russian victory. That pattern is all too clearly established.

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.

Underestimating the Finns' ability to just get stuff done seems to be a common motif throughout history.

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.

And would deter Russian invasion (supply lines rule everything around me) which would significantly reduce their large military spending.

> would deter Russian invasion

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...

There's enough tolerance that you can run 1520mm rolling stock on 1524mm track and vice versa.

Now you owe me a coffee and a keyboard

> funneling more EU funding

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...

On the other hand....

"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...

Amazing.

I wonder if one can do anything like this with the current concrete sleepers and thermite welded tracks.

The welds could be cut and rewelded, obviously.

The sleepers are molded with preset widths, however, and would need replacement.

Probably the biggest challenge is that there is way more rail traffic today and it's more tightly coupled in logistics chains and people's day to day lives. Disruptions are more expensive and harder to tolerate. And that's on top of the technical challenges, tolerances leave less room for error today.

(US centric assumption)

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.

Passenger travel is easy mode. The economic consequences of disrupted freight dwarf anything you could imagine from disrupted passenger travel of equal duration. That's why the US has always strived to do a really, really good job with their freight rail system, and US freight is still to this day generally considered the best freight rail system in the world, even as passenger rail lags well behind.

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.

Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price. Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days. Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways, and semis outcompete rail for network volume, ease of delivery, and adaptability to constraints.

I see several trains go by per day on my pretty sleepy tracks. You have no clue the amount of semis that would need to be built to accommodate your proposal, they just do not wait in the wings. Do you think all the bulk shipments are being done for fun and someone isn't waiting for 5000 gallons of HCL and 2000 tons of coal?

I'm well aware that it's a couple hundred trucks to replace a single train. I'm not sure you understand that this is what already happens. Rail carries around a quarter of freight ton-miles in the US. Trucks carry much more than that. All of the stuff that isn't bulk, time insensitive freight, or anything that surges in excess of the carefully scheduled rail capacity already has to spill over onto trucks. That includes things like disaster recovery shipments, unusual seasonal demand, and so on. There's also a population of truckers that work these temporary jobs, as well as a certain level of excess vehicle capacity in the fleet carriers to service it, plus whatever truckers can be pulled from other work to meet the demand.

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.

Thanks for the response. I'm curious what percent of stuff that would normally end up on train ends up as spillover onto trucks. Any idea? I think stuff is quite finetuned already and there may only be an extra few percent of capacity in trucks. I agree, in a lot of cases it might work to just bite the bullet and wait or try a different apparatus. However the stuff on the trains typically is not slackable. That is, you aren't transporting computers and sofas via rail.

Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand. With limited supply big companies will be able to a compete for the available trucks at really high prices but small-mid businesses will be left out.

Small-mid businesses generally are not shipping on rail to begin with, unless they've been bundled as part of a larger shipment by an intermodal carrier. If you've ever tried to talk to a rail carrier, they really don't want to deal with companies under a certain size.

>Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand.

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.

This is not as true in the US where domestic shipping is subject to the expenses of the Jones Act.

> Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price.

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.

Feel free to look up the ton-mile by distance numbers. Rail exceeds trucks by fairly narrow margins only for hauls between 1,000-2,000 miles. Below that distance, trucks dominate. Above that distance, trucks also dominate. Even in that band, it's like a narrow difference of like 35% vs 40%.

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).

I was told a while ago "trains are great if you want to move a trainload of stuff, trucks are great if you want to move a few truckloads of stuff". I guess trains also need loading/unloading facilities and stations close to your origin and destination, and perhaps a hump yard somewhere.

Cargo ships beat everything hands down if there's a port close to your origin and destination, and lots of water in between.

> "Today, there are less passenger trains than back then"

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Since it's only 90 mm, I wonder if one could add some sort of a 45 mm lateral adapter between the rails and the ties on both sides. At least for low speed track parts...

Imagine one short "train" whose tail is able to pull up one rail of the track behind it. Then another train whose front is an automated thingamajig to take the loose rail and nail it down a specific distance from the fixed rail. How much play there is in the loose rail depends on how far apart these two train are. Notice that the nailer runs on the narrow rails while the nail-puller runs on the wide ones.

Probably not, but laying track or replacing sleepers is a very satisfying to look at, fully automated process.

Even the wooden sleepers would have to be weakened by moving the spikes over. Unless the old holes were patched.

An impressive feat, that is unlikely unachievable on a modern train network.

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.

In the US, rail tolerances seem to be getting looser over time, and derailments are still uncommon.

I’d guess that overseas modern non-high speed trains could deal with it. The passengers might not put up with it though.

A country that would put up with US rail is a big ask.

Derailments are incredibly common in the US.

There have been around 3 derailments per day in the US in the past few years: https://www.nlc.org/resource/interactive-rail-safety-map-see...

>The tolerances are just a bit tighter, the risks and liabilities are higher, and the workforce just isn't "there"

Sure, but they do it with big machines that ride down the rails now instead of lining up thousands of men with sledge hammers.

There are no ready-made gauge changing machines, though. Not exactly a big market for those.

Once Spain and Portugal move from Iberian gauge that market will increase a lot. Which is kinda inevitable with the added environmental pressure on flights.

It is taking decades to achieve though!

There are no ready-made gauge changing machines, though. Not exactly a big market for those.

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.

Yeah, in theory, but the vibes are different.

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.

Switzerland has some for narrow (meter) gauge to standard gauge. I think it's to make the Glacier Express run without changing train. Had a bit of teething problems at the start but seems to be working well now.

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?

There are ready-made machines that pull up track, and replace sleepers... it shouldn't be a major project to allow it to change the gauge of the rail as it resets it.

>There are no ready-made gauge changing machines, though. Not exactly a big market for those.

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.

> this is from a time when rail was a huge money earner and could afford to employ a huge number of people.

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.

Corresponding discussion:

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.

So odd - was listening to an account of this in an Audiobook just yesterday - "Why Nothing Works" by Marc Dunkelman. Was essentially making the point that this sort of thing would be several magnitudes of difficulty harder to pull off today, and certainly wouldn't happen within that timeframe.

> Now, the only broad-gauge rail tracks in the United States are on some city transit systems.

One such oddball is the TTC subway/streetcar gauge of 1495 mm in Toronto, Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto-gauge_railways

Does it imply that, Toronto finally is one of United States cities with broad gauge rail tracks?

Makes it even crazier that Bart would choose a non-standard gauge 75 years later. And now they're stuck paying for custom trains with less flexibility and longer lead times.

BART was always going to need custom trains for other reasons beyond track gauge. Electric third rail at those speeds isn't standard. 125kV pantagraph would mean big expensive tunnels and stations due to clearance requirements.

Electric third rail at 130 km/h? The LIRR does it, with standard gauge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island_Rail_Road

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.

Third rail lines south of London often run at 90mph and up to 100mph in places. BART’s top speed is 80mph.

12.5kV?

Thank you!

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].

[0]: https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/1410829/report-shows-that-cha...

[1]: https://api.hankeikkuna.fi/asiakirjat/697c1f25-332b-40ed-9d6...

I agree that a new line at least from Tornio to Oulu would make sense. There's also a lot of heavy industry in the Gulf of Bothnia, like Raahe and Kokkola.

Ok, we've changed to that URL from https://www.trenvista.net/en/news/rnhs/finland-migration-sta... above. Thanks!

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.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballast_cleaner

> 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

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.

One such relaying train does 500m in one hour, including new sleepers. Seeing several such things in operation several times in several places, this should be doable without much modification when the gauge change is so small. Regarding switches and crossings, those come preassambled nowadays, and are just 'plugged in'.

Get a look on the track topology on openrailwaymap:

https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=gauge&lat=62.774837258...

That's only the main tracks. There's a huge amount not seen on that map.

Scroll in.

Oh, right you are! I stand corrected.

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.

That's very interesting. I wonder why Spain is different than the rest of Europe, given it's connected by land.

It makes more sense for islands such as Ireland to retain their old gauge.

Nobody really knows. It was decided back in the XIX century when the rail network was build. The most common answer is that they thought larger locomotives would be required to climb the mountainous terrain in the Peninsula, which was not the case at all. Urban legends say that absolutely nobody in the committee that decided it had any idea about how trains work. Probably it was a protectionist measure to benefit local manufacturers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_legend

Probably more to do with the fact that the first train in Spain was build in Cuba

But the trains in Cuba used standard gauge. And the early trains in the north of Spain used (and still use) a narrow-gauge. It was when the central government decided to build a nation-wide network that the Iberian-gauge was chosen, making it incompatible with both the pre-existing Spanish railways and other continental European railways, in the infamous "Informe Subercase" [1]. It is the perfect example of design-by-committee, in which no technical reasons are given other than there are wider and narrower gauges, so they choose an arbitrary middle ground.

bast copy of the Subercase report I could find: [1] https://www.agrupament.cat/documents/Informe%20Subercase.pdf

The reason is quite obvious if you know Spain's History.

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.

The Hisatsu line[1] in Japan was built through pretty insane terrain to make it protected from coastal attacks after the Russo-Japanese war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hisatsu_Line

> It makes more sense for islands such as Ireland to retain their old gauge.

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.

Britain is no longer an island - it now has a tunnel connection to France, so as far as rail is concerned, it's a peninsula.

Yup, but it's just the one connection; even if there were a gauge difference it could be dealt with.

Ironically, Britain is now an island with an extremely busy train connection to continental Europe.

Soon, you might go from London to Köln without switching trains!

Did Britain start out with the same gauge as India?

I kinda expected India and Britain to use the same gauge, and was a bit surprised.

Also, what's going on in Australia?

> Did Britain start out with the same gauge as India?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gauge_in_Australia

In addition to the other comment, which I agree as I've heard the same, for the most part Spain and Portugal have been operating as if the Iberian Peninsula was an island. The Pyrenees are a big barrier, and in Franco's era the country was very isolated.

The same happens with the electricity grid, even though it is connected to France, it has very small capacity.

The Iberian Peninsula functioned like an island in many contexts. Yes, it is attached to the rest of Europe, but in order to get there, you need to cross high mountains. Note how few roads and railways cross between Spain and France.

There are still trains going from France to Spain, the train change gauge before crossing the border (in either Cerbère or Portbou station)

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

I see it fine when zooming in a bit on mobile

Also barely any contrast between 1520mm and 1524mm, but I'm sure the trains would mind that distinction a lot.

Trains don't even notice that. Russian wagons with nominal gauge of 1520 mm are an everyday sight on the Finnish rail network, nominal gauge 1524 mm. And yes, regardless of sanctions.

https://vaunut.org/kuva/174390?tag0=24%7CVgobo%7C

Gauge differences less than ~25mm are considered interoperable to some degree. At a 4mm gauge difference, that's basically less than the tolerance for even the most demanding high-speed track.

Yes, but the tracks themselves are labeled if you zoom in on the map.

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.

This is a strategic move: it makes it easier to move weapons within Europe and makes it much harder for Russia should they invade.

Ideally you would want to do this all over Europe.

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.

We absolutely can. They'd just be deeply uncomfortable.

> They'd just be deeply uncomfortable.

I rode these kind of trains in multiple countries and continents and there's nothing uncomfortable about them.

Why do you say that?

I think they're joking. A double decker train is only feasible in the UK if everyone sits on the floor.

Yeah, per sibling I think this is a joke about building a double decker train that's not tall enough for people to stand up in.

Because of the tight loading gauge in Britain, trying to cram two decks in would make it very small. It's been tried (once[0]) and they weren't able to make it fully double-decker, quick to load/unload, or especially comfortable.

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).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR_Class_4DD

I rode double decker trains in the Netheraland, US, Germany and France and they were very good - same space and I would say headroom as a normal train.

I was not aware that the UK has a different gauge than Europe and US.

Yes - to a surprising extent. The best diagram I've seen overlays them[0]. The British gauges are the smaller ones starting with W - with W6 being available essentially everywhere and the higher numbers on specially cleared routes to make it easier to move larger freight containers. GA and GB are standard Western European gauges: both taller and wider.

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....

> it wasn't for the UK, which is why we can't have nice things like double decker commuter trains

I think bridge heights are the bigger problem here

We have a few lines with decent guages.

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.

> "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."

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.

Presumably you could use them on longer direct routes. London to Edinburgh non-stop is 4.5 hours, so a bit of extra time at each end wouldn’t make much difference.

> I've noticed all the bridges we get on stations these days are much higher.

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.

> I'm not sure whether the loading gauge (allowed size of train to fit under bridges) etc. is also standardized

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.

> why we can't have nice things like double decker commuter trains.

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.

It depends entirely on the context. For routes where total travel time is mostly governed by moving time, and the stationary time in stops is negligible, the capacity boost from double-deckers easily outweighs the longer (un)loading times. The alternatives to increase capacity can also be problematic: with longer trains you start running out of platform length (and long platforms add walking time); while running more trains closer together requires more personnel and rolling stock, and is limited by signaling block size and braking distance.

Trains can run fully automated today, and if you are running into capacity issues they should be. You may still need more personnel, but it is a different type of personnel and full automation gives enough other advantages as to be worth it.

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.

> Trains can run fully automated today

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.

... however our new high-speed lines (HS1 and, eventually, HS2) are built to the largest European loading gauge (UIC GC).

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).

So little actual difference.

It is extremely hard to put even a single land-based railway line out of action; just look at Ukraine. Yes lines are getting hit but there are engineering units who can repair them very quickly. You'd have to be within artillery range to really take it out.

In this case I believe that there is only one link with the long Russian border within 200km (approx). What's more, the border between Sweden and Finland is along a river and so the railway crosses it on a bridge, two bridges, even.

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).

> 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.

You assume a country has a cohesive long term strategy which is obviously not the case since there are ephemeral people involved.

> why didn't it do so in 1945 when it was there for the taking

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland#World_War_II

Russia has always wanted more ice-free ports. It's a major geographic problem.

"For the taking" when Russia had already suffered some 1.3 million casualties from Finland alone.

> 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.

it's an absurd approach, and insane cost, if that's the goal.

> 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?

> "Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."

Check back in in a few years and all your questions will be answered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_gauge

> 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.

This is an ongoing project, not a past project though ?

I thought this is a project for a new railway, not reguaging existing track ?

Correct it is a new rail line not an alteration of existing tracks, but it goes into some existing and new (mostly cargo) stations so some stations will have both gauges of track.

No visible result is the goal. The change is minimal but makes the system compatible with other EU carriages. Did the Baltics attempt this or succeed?

They're clearly referring to economic results.

It is ongoing project but there doesn't seem to me enough financing, the money that EU allocates only cover about half of the required budget so they are looking for investors.

Progress has been made and is ongoing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica#Project_progress

I've read your link. Where's the actual progress?

But billions of euros has already been spent.

Yes, that’s how things work. You spend money on projects before their completion, just like you buy ingredients for dinner before a meal arrives on your plate.

I imagine you’re looking for the subheadings titled “completed in 2015” and “construction (2017-present)” though.

Today is 2025. Rail Baltica started in 2013.

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.

You are counting from some early planning phases. Compare, for example, how long it took for the UK to build High Speed 1 line.

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.

I doubt you've read the link since there are 3 sub-headers that explain the progress.

The work is very much ongoing in Lithuania: 114 km of railway is under construction, with tracks already laid in large parts of it. That is 43% of the initial phase (links to Poland and Latvia).

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.

I've read that (not tracks but) stations are the sources of big overruns for Rail Baltica.

I think you can ”upgrade” the tracks to use three rails so you can handle both track widths. Also there are trains with adjustabe axle widths.

Not possible here because the widths are too close together to install a third rail.

Given the small difference, maybe the easiest option is to "just" update the wheel axles of the entire fleet in the same time and at the same speed as the tracks.

Wheels are anyway wearing parts and are to be changed periodically.

BTW, I'm just speculating out loud.

You’d need four rails, a 9 cm separation isn’t enough to fit two side by side. This solution has been ruled out as technically infeasible (I don’t even want to think about what the switches would look like…)

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).

Adjustable-gauge are used in Switzerland for a mountain line (Montreux-Interlaken) all through the year. I have never seen temperature issue mentioned. https://www.gpx.swiss/en/stories/technology (the video is rather cool)

That is cool, thanks for posting!

Nevertheless that’s what the initial feasibility studies showed. I don’t think the amount of complexity involved in that Swiss system would scale at all.

This reminded me about a joke.

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.

Sounds like a variation on the "Tsar's finger" anecdote

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/580-the-legend-of-the-tsar...

Wikipedia says 1435 and 1524 are too close for triple rail, you have to do quadruple.

Part of the motivation is removing the Russian gauge rails such that they can't be used in the case of invasion, so I don't think dual-gauge is really an option here.

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

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).

[1] https://yle.fi/a/74-20161793

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki%E2%80%93Tallinn_Tunne...

> I am not convinced this project is ever going to pay for itself.

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".

Assuming Russia waits 30-50 years until Finland has new tracks :))

Well, the last Russian invasion of Finland was over 80 years ago, and presumably Russia will continue to exist in some form..

It will take that long for them to replace their military stockpiles.

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.

I understand that but it is still economic: I highly doubt fixing a minor delay in material movement is the most effective use of these billions.

I don’t think it’s a minor delay. In other places where gauge changes are necessary, I think it typically takes on the order of an hour or a few hours, so if you need a big logistics operation across the border from Sweden into Finland, that bottleneck is going to absolutely murder your throughput.

I hadn't considered throughput but that's a good point. Under normal circumstances even a few hours is meaningless but if you need to get lots of trains across the border in a short span of time it starts to accumulate.

The land border between Sweden and Finland is in the far north where few people live. It would be preferred to not do switches there because that means you need to build/maintain a town for all the needed workers (and families), and said town won't provide much opportunities for any other jobs. In short if you must switch gauges you really want to to be in a smaller city (maybe 100k people) that has other reason to exist so you have a pool of people to hire, who have other reasons to live there and thus have family there.

It is not a minor delay and in case of war such a delay can easily cost billions.

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.

> 300 km/h trains connecting Finnland with Spain with no delay or bumps?

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.

Couldn't they build something similar to the eurotunnel but with denmark and sweden?

There is a bridge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge

And more tunnels are getting build.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_fixed_link

Oh. I should've looked it up before making a statement on it. My apologies and thanks for the correction.

That bridge is going to be incredibly easy to destroy, should a big enough country wish that. And it definitely isn't going to be rebuilt quickly enough to matter for a war.

With nukes, you can destroy anything. Otherwise the kerch bridge is still standing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge

Russia does not want that bridge to fall. Ukraine likely does but wasn't able to execute (outside of artillery range by now, limited access to long-range missiles, utter lack of sea power in the area, failure to anticipate circumstances enough to take it out while they still had control over area). All other countries are trying to not get involved, including not selling Ukraine (many) long-distance high destructive power missiles.

I wouldn't generalize from that to "nobody could destroy a bridge".

"I wouldn't generalize from that to "nobody could destroy a bridge".

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.

Yeah, I meant the northern way, but a tunnel into the baltics, or a normal, peaceful landconnection over St.Petersburg would of course make more sense for connecting Helsinki. Or connecting Helsinki with Stockholm via Åland.

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...

> 300 km/h trains connecting Finnland with Spain with no delay or bumps?

Have you seen a map of the region?

Estonia / Eastern Europe uses the Russian gauge.

Rail Baltica will connect the Baltics to European rail network using 1435mm gauge. It is scheduled to be fully operational in 2030.

The idea for the Baltics is that east-west lines can remain Russian gauge but north-south lines (esp. new ones) are European gauge.

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.

The Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel would be expensive, but in the current climate of hostilities with Russia, the EU could support it just to make a point.

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.)

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.

You lost me at ‘single model of 300km/h train that can make it here’

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

Don’t OBB Railjet trains travel at 230km/h?

Australia, not Austria ;)

I can count on one hand how often I've seen that mixup happen in that direction.

As an austrian, I am amused.

Is it Austria that has the stands in the airport for tourists who thought they were buying tickets to Australia, or is it the other way around?

I am not familiar enough with air travel that I can say either way.

But austria and australia regularily exchange mail that got sent to the wrong country.

I think it's a myth that originated from an ad: https://www.vol.at/2023/11/397526796_1104257417472438_811840...

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 :)

Apparently people confuse cities when flying too, here’s an article about a passenger going to the wrong Sydney, and more examples:

https://simpleflying.com/ameican-airlines-passenger-flies-si...

Wow not even a verbal slip up I literally read Australia as Austria. Equally impressed and horrified with myself

Paint them! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleis#/media/Datei:Mariazeller...

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

I wonder if those trains was imported from Italy ? During the Danish transition to IC-4 some of those trains ended up with Gaddafi in Libiya (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/02/this-was-gaddafis-pers...)

No, they're Spanish trains: the Talgo Avril (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talgo_AVRIL, https://youtu.be/6iFfVpZwLJ4?si=ahxuQnauNw1-ucqR). It's a model specifically designed for that.

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.

Does that train have the British Advanced Passenger Train in it's ancestory? The carriage shape that is narrower at the top looks familiar.

In 1886 the USA switched the rail gauge of the southern states to standard gauge. Most of the work was done over two days.

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.

If you want to, you can do it fairly fast. The decades plan is nonsense. It cannot take decades to change tracks, especially since the size of the rail network is quite small.

Toronto has 83 km of TTC-gauge streetcar track. 99% of it is set in concrete. This would take a little longer than 2 days.

If you want to nitpick about some corner case, go ahead.

I have this feeling that Finland's railway tracks are not set in concrete at street level ;)

But they are set into prefabricated concrete sleepers, which cannot be modified to a new track gauge and instead need to be swapped out completely. Whereas during the US gauge change, the railways used wooden sleepers, with the rails fastened simply with nails hammered into the sleepers, so it was simply a matter of pulling out the nails and hammering them in again at the new track gauge.

There are machines these days that change sleepers automatically. I do not know if they do gauge conversion, but changing track (meaning replacing old one) and sleepers nowadays is fully automated.

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).

Yes, those kind of track relaying machines exist, and they could most likely be adapted to work for the gauge change (one end of the machine would have to be set up for broad gauge and the other end for standard gauge), but they still manage only a few kilometres of track per day, and they're comparatively rare and expensive – basically there are only enough of them around for the amount of track relaying required during routine maintenance.

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.

There are metal sleepers that sit on a concrete pad. The challenging part is the rail is encased in concrete that enables drivers to drive over the tracks.

Getting to the sleepers would take weeks of jackhammering plus more time to repour the concrete.

The decades are planning so the process happens fast. There is a lot that needs to happen correctly to do this fast.

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...

This is a lot easier to do with wooden sleepers than with concrete ones. You can drive new nails into wooden sleepers almost at will, so you can keep the sleepers in place and "just" move one rail to a different position. Concrete sleepers have pre-fabricated holes for the indicated gauge, which means replacing them.

German soldiers re-gauged Soviet railways on a very short notice too when Barbarossa started.

Building a machine, if it doesn't exist, to rapidly make small holes in concrete shouldn't be hard.

It is not just holes. I didn't want to analyze the entire problem in full, but FIY, this is how a concrete sleeper looks like:

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.

Most of the work was not done over two days, it says they did a bunch of prep work before the two days to minimize the downtime, and besides being done within two years they didn't specify how long the prep work.

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.

> 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).

What leads you to believe Ireland will introduce standard gauge?

If the proposed Cork-Dublin-Belfast high speed line (the 300km/h one, not to be confused with Irish Rail's _other_ more short-term project to bring Dublin-Cork to 200km/h standard, which will use the existing line) goes ahead, it'll almost certainly be a new standard gauge line, separate from the existing ones. Huge 'if', of course.

India had a meter gauge to broad gauge but India was always a mix and India did a very slow transition to standardize on broad gauge which kinda smoothen stuff quiet a bit

> 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.

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.

North Korea !

That article has a short paragraph mentioning it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44033310

  > 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.

They'll probably go line by line.

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.

Problem with line by line is you need to have gauge switching systems someplace - line be line means you are moving all that.

The need for that is pretty much a given with this change. I don't think it's avoidable.

While not completely avoidable, it is partially avoidable if you carefully plan. Moving all your gauge change equipment is expensive, so if you can avoid one that is worth a lot.

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.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6nigsberg

> The project is theoretically a good idea but it's not really practical

Why do you say 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.

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.

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)

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.

Slightly more indepth article, with links to some background: https://yle.fi/a/74-20161606

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.

The goal is defence - to prevent easy russian train logistics deep into Finland.

Wants to prevent the Russians from fielding dual gauge technology like the Spanish?

Finnish climate is not suitable

Dual gauge trains are technically much more complicated, making them more expensive to build, maintain, repair etc. Dual gauge do not work well (or at all depending) in the cold climate of Finland and if they did, the changeover takes time which adds up when you are trying to move thousands of cars worth of material. Dual gauge trains still need changeover stations, which are themselves expensive and complicated, as well as being targets for attack.

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.

Yes. Have them work for it.

Far easier is to just destroy the train tracks with explosives that connect between Finland and Russia (or demolish them like done in Salla after letting them rot).

There's no defensive reason for this other than in the cabinet talks.

False.

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.

Bridges are hard to rebuild quickly and they can be destroyed using glide bombs and cruise missiles. Ukraine struggles to do this because has very small air force and don't have enough tools to sufficiently suppress Russian air defence. NATO air force is stronger and can in theory acheive air superiority.

If you look at the map you will see that there isn't multiple tracks coming from Russia to Finland. Some of them were even designed to be blown up if necessary (such as the Salla rail tracks).

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.

IIRC Russian army had, prior to the outbreak of the current war, several tens of thousands of soldiers specialized just in emergency railway construction and repairs. IDK how many remain now.

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.

Far easier to re-build a few miles of tracks destroyed at the border then to re-gauge hundreds of miles of tracks....

Even if the goal is defence it doesn't look like the best way to spend many. Finland is not a huge country, logistic using track is possible and incompatible rail gauge is a weak defence. IMHO it would be better to spend money on military to get a fast effect and in 20-30 years at most the threat will likely will be no longer relevant.

They might be too late.

Defense is the "headline" goal. Less-clicky (but similarly important) goals are (1) easing trade & travel with the countries which the Finns expect to be doing the great majority of their trade & travel with, and (2) getting massive EU funding for the rebuilding & modernization of a whole lotta old Finnish rail infrastructure.

At least the Russian gage is broader than the European one.

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.

Why would it matter much? Either way, a new railway has to be built (others have pointed out dual-gauge is not workable).

If you have to go from a smaller gauge to a bigger one you most likely have to also expand corridors, buy new land, fix bridges and tunnels etc...

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.

That's mostly an issue with loading gauge, not track gauge. The train is usually significantly wider than the tracks, so width-wise the space should already be available.

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.)

Is this connected to NATO & not being able to move military stuff fast? Timing sure seems to suggest that

Yes, it is because of NATO. They've been thinking about it for some time, but NATO tipped the scales.

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.

It's the most expensive way to stop incoming trains. Tracks can be easily destroyed if Russia attacks.

From what I know they can be rebuilt easily and Russia has tons of engineering units for this specific purpose. That's what they did in Ukraine.

I assume that changing the gauge also affects other related equipment such as signaling and such, which would make rebuilding much harder.

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.

I’d imagine that would make planning and implementation more complex

Sure but if you already spend work teams along every railroad in the country, it would be a waste not do everything else.

If they build new lines next to existing ones, they need to touch all that stuff anyway. No point in replicating old systems.

The signalling you are describing is more complex and possibly more expensive than switching rail. Source: I work in rail traffic engineering.

The idea is simple. Ensuring everything is smooth and safe = cost multiplier.

They will have to do it anyway in the same timeframe.

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.

Interesting. Do you have more sources?

About the US gauge change: http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8/gauge.html

Thanks!

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?

> unless concrete sleepers are in use

Which they are, as even a quick search would have shown.

You mean in the late 19th century? Things have changed quite a bit since then.

> in response to the need to improve military mobility

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.

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.

Because the benefits are negligible.

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?

Longer trains are not a simple solution as side tracks for passing by need to also be longer. Also longer trains means building and running more carriages, which is more expensive.

Why are wider inter-track requiring larger curves? It should be the same, but with better lateral stability.

My refactoring brain wants to do this by adding the new rail next to the old one, so you can still run the old trains while building.

But 89mm is probably too small a margin for that to work.

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.

https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/infrastructu...

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).

The connection between Finland and Sweden was built in 1919, however it was recently electrified(January 2025). It's dual gauge(four rails).

Ok so it's passengers link that is under development. Doesn't change the big picture, though.

I don't think there are any ongoing projects, the current link can take passenger trains but there are no plans to do so at the moment.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torne%C3%A5%E2%80%93Haparanda-...

The WSJ did an interesting video a few days ago about this topic ("How This $27B Baltic Railway Will Fortify NATO Against Russia")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eA5oEXEFlI

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.

It's a tradeoff and worthy of deliberation.

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.

This has clear military implications, as it will eventually allow larger amounts of equipment to be shipped quickly from fellow NATO countries.

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 wonder if there will be measures for backwards compatibility in the transition period. Like having dual track widths.

There's only 89mm difference between the two widths - I'd guess that isn't enough room to have both on the same track.

This is how it looks (Galati, Romania):

https://greatnews.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/linia-ferata...

I can only imagine what the switches look like.

I believe something like this: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F8...

There's already some dual-gauge track on the border with Sweden in Haparanda/Tornio[1].

[1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qjRZTz3K9sbVYpDX6

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.

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.

Wow, I thought that might make sense with an agressive nation state at the border before even reading the article.

Intesting times.

As someone from a country neighbouring russia, I wish my country decided to do this as well.

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.

"Russia has been screwed up for the last eight hundred years, and Russia will be screwed up for the next eight hundred years."

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.

My heart sunk after reading this paragraph:

> The government is expected to make the final decision by July 2027, with construction starting around 2032.

> The government is expected to make the final decision by July 2027

You can't announce migration if you haven't decided you plan to migrate...

Yes, this is political marketing.

Given the 5 year estimate until full-scale russian invasion against EU, it's gonna be to late.

Oh I didn’t know they published their timeline. Do you have a link?

https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-war-threat-europe-wit...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-agrees-five-year-dea...

https://militarnyi.com/en/news/eu-top-diplomat-russia-may-at...

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 rest of europe should move to the broader guage. It is more stable.

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.

It would also make switches and curves larger so it would not be possible in constrained (city) environments already present.

While narrower gauges are somewhat more favourable to tighter curve radii, ultimately the difference is negligible enough that it can be ignored. At the extreme end of the range, curve radii for standard gauge trams can go down into the 10 – 15 m range just the same as metre gauge networks, and for mainline railways curve radii instead are usually limited by vehicle geometry and mostly line speeds (centrifugal forces), which (especially the latter) aren't related to the track 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.

The rail gauge doesn't really matter but personally I wish Europe adopted the Russian loading gauge with 3.750m wide cars opposed to 3.080m wide. It makes a big difference on the comfort of sleeping carriages, you also have +2 seats on 2nd/3rd class sitting carriages and +1 seat on the 1st class.

That's of course completely impossible but one can dream.

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.

Unrelated in every way except it involves rail.

Very much related because it involves an upgrade to be able to reach your neighbors by rail. Soon possible in Finland, and German has also announced to enable rail connections to the south of Poland.

Both Germany and Poland are only mostly electrified.

Just note Finland uses the Tsarist Russian 1524 mm gauge. Not the Allied Soviet 1520 mm gauge.

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.

Yes it is in tolerances. But the specification is different.

Allegro train had 1522 wheelsets, effectively built for a non-existent gauge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_Class_Sm6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railway...

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.

I wonder if they actually made new trains etc 4mm smaller, or if it was in name only.

If I recall correctly, the rolling stock remained the same, tracks were re-railed and the 4mm came from tolerances that were historically very loose. So the stated goal was to get higher speed and stability from tighter tolerances.

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.

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