Show HN: 90s.dev - game maker that runs on the web (90s.dev)
92 points by 90s_dev 1h ago 41 comments
Show HN: Olelo Foil - NACA Airfoil Sim (foil.olelohonua.com)
3 points by rbrownmh 10m ago 1 comments
Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
366 axelfontaine 330 5/20/2025, 7:40:28 AM trenvista.net ↗
My comments:
The important thing to note that at this point it's just a political posturing and an announcement of intent. They haven't shown any concrete technical plan how this would actually be executed.
> "Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years. Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."
Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.
"Unification to standard gauge on May 31 – June 1, 1886 [United States]
In 1886, the southern railroads agreed to coordinate changing gauge on all their tracks. After considerable debate and planning, most of the southern rail network was converted from 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge to 4 ft 9 in (1,448 mm) gauge, then the standard of the Pennsylvania Railroad, over two days beginning on Monday, May 31, 1886. Over a period of 36 hours, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from the west rail of all the broad gauge lines in the South, moved them 3 in (76 mm) east and spiked them back in place.[6] The new gauge was close enough that standard gauge equipment could run on it without problem. By June 1886, all major railroads in North America, an estimated 11,500 miles (18,500 km), were using approximately the same gauge. To facilitate the change, the inside spikes had been hammered into place at the new gauge in advance of the change. Rolling stock was altered to fit the new gauge at shops and rendezvous points throughout the South. The final conversion to true standard gauge took place gradually as part of routine track maintenance.[6] Now, the only broad-gauge rail tracks in the United States are on some city transit systems."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_the_United_Stat...
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.
Sure, but they do it with big machines that ride down the rails now instead of lining up thousands of men with sledge hammers.
I’d guess that overseas modern non-high speed trains could deal with it. The passengers might not put up with it though.
The Days They Changed the Gauge (1966) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8371773 (2014, 15 comments)
And a related discussion:
Why BART uses a nonstandard broad gauge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031131 (2022, 253 comments)
The BART discussion was where I first learned about the North American 2-day gauge change. A truly inspiring feat for so many engineers to come together across such a large amount of land area to Make It Happen.
One such oddball is the TTC subway/streetcar gauge of 1495 mm in Toronto, Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto-gauge_railways
I wonder if one can do anything like this with the current concrete sleepers and thermite welded tracks.
The sleepers are molded with preset widths, however, and would need replacement.
It might be easier to change today than it was in 1886. Back then, trains were really the only means of travel between cities. Today, there are less passenger trains than back then, though more freight (even with trucks and planes). But freight diversions/delays could be scheduled well in advance and have alternative means. Not to mention, since then we've developed variable gauge train tech. A subset of trains could run during the cutover.
It's likely more costly today, but less disruptive.
Remember that freight is more than just moving pallets of finished goods to Amazon warehouses. It doesn't matter if you've given the cows a month's advance notice, if they don't have feed they're still going to starve; and no matter how many KPIs you dangle at the silos, they're only going to hold x amount of reserve grain.
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.
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.
I don't think this is true in Europe. Certainly in the UK, passenger rail volume since the 2010s has set records higher than in any previous years, exceeding numbers that were last seen before WW2. Today there are fewer miles of track than there were in that era, but modern signalling technology allows more trains to operate safely on the same tracks, and modern trains run much faster on average.
As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.
It's also that rail tends to be more competitive for long haul traffic, and the US operators have big trans-continental freight networks well suited to that. In Europe there's a sharp drop off in modal share as freight crosses borders. Each national railway operator is in practice fiercely protective of its own turf, and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. So in practice cross-border freight is largely done with trucks instead.
Despite the EU commission wanting to get some competition going on the rails and better interoperability requirements etc etc. for at least the past 30 years, the operators are still in the "discussion about preparing to setup a committee to discuss interoperability" phase.
[0]: https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/1410829/report-shows-that-cha...
[1]: https://api.hankeikkuna.fi/asiakirjat/697c1f25-332b-40ed-9d6...
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...
No comments yet
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...
It is not that hard. Countries like Spain have already two different gauges and have the necessary technology in the trains to change between different systems.
Any hindrance we can put on the Finnish-Russian border to stop them just unloading 12 cars of fresh troops in the middle of the country is a good thing.
https://x.com/TrentTelenko/status/1507056013245128716
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
(Of course a more thorough analysis would probably come to the conclusion that better logistics is worth it. There's still an opportunity cost for those conscripts who could do something else instead, like dying in zerg rushes on the Ukrainian front. And even though those conscripts are 'free' they still require chow and a place to sleep etc.)
Now you’re just being silly.
Your cite?
Of course, if it does go that far, tanks and trains can move rolling stock, rip up the tracks, blow up bridges and other infrastructure behind them if they're forced to retreat.
IIRC the diff to European standard is closer to 10cm, still doable but a hurdle compared to just driving a trainload of troops to the middle of Helsinki it's a bit harder
1524 - 1435 = 89
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railway...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-gauge_railway
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.
Conceptually? Nothing.
But building such trains, at scale, takes a load of resources. Resources which could otherwise be used to build tanks, guns, missiles, and similar high-priority products.
> what's to prevent
Russian lack of logistical planning.
This doesn't seem like it can be a goal given
> maybe in 2032 we can start construction
I mean unless the plan is to assume Russia won't attack until e.g. 2040 when construction will be complete && Russia can't implement multi-gauge trains that Spain is already using now?
And in any case, just as in computer security, a security posture does not need to be unassailable, it just needs to be expensive enough to deter the enemy. NATO countries (well, the ones that haven't already been compromised by Russia) will be happy to fund the gauge switch, as would the EU in general for the sake of greater economic integration. Meanwhile, it increases the costs on Russia and slows their advance. It's a win no matter what.
Following logic it also increases your own costs and wastes money that could've been allocated to produce weapons and other more effective preventive measures.
Where did I say about single thing: "...weapons and other more effective preventive measures..."
Looking from the other angle - should Russia attack it'll trigger article 5. Russia can not win conventional war with NATO. It is just laughable. They're not that suicidal. And if they are it'll escalate to nuclear and then the railroad will be your last worry.
We need to have resolve!
Without the US Navy, NATO loses any war in the Baltic Sea. If Putin thinks the US won't respect Article 5, then he'll attack anyway. And if the US Navy is annihilated in a war against China, he'll attack anyway. Finland needs all the separation from Russia it can get.
He's absolutely not harmless, but neither should we allow ourselves to be distracted by phony countermeasures against the Russian threat, like this gauge shift thing clearly is in my opinion.
He's co-opting the red army's defeat of Nazi Germany for his own popularity purposes. Which is impressive, considering he's also disavowing communism. It would hardly have been possible, if it weren't for fringe (but not fringe enough) movements in Eastern Europe playing along with it. Not because they're pro-Russian, far from it, but because their old nationalist groups often were aligned with the nazis, and they want to rehabilitate them. Putin and these groups totally agree that the conflict should be framed as being between Russia and these groups.
This is dangerously naive. Propagandists like Putin don't need real grievances, they're happy to invent grievances and brainwash the population into believing them. In light of this fact, there's zero downside and nonzero upside to decouple from Russia (at least for any state which intends to remain independent) which makes it a no-brainer.
Or maybe you accept that you are human too, vulnerable to the same thing, and maybe you are the brainwashed one, but you don't care?
Going down either of these roads ends you up with the neonazis in the long run (and yes, Russia has a lot of them too).
So no, it's not naive to point out the good points that feed the propaganda. What's naive is to think that dictators can manufacture good propaganda out of thin air anyway so it doesn't matter what "our side" is guilty of.
Putin is a gangster, not a cult leader. He's in it for himself, the people around him are in it for themselves. No one thinks he's selfless, least of all regular Russian people. It takes effort to keep something like that together. Unfortunately, he gets help from his foreign enemies.
No, I don't read that at all. There's plenty of Russian propaganda that Westerners have fallen for hook, line, and sinker, chief among them the idea that all Russian speakers are actually Russian and want to be a part of the Russia.
The point is that the propagandists don't need to base their propaganda on truth. A salient historical example here is actually World War II: the Germans tried to provoke Poland into overreacting and causing a major incident in Danzig to justify their invasion of Poland. The Poles refused to play ball, so when the appointed hour came, the Germans made up some atrocity and used it as the basis of the declaration of war, faking the evidence early in the invasion. Given that Russia has already used a similar pretext regarding Russian speakers in Ukraine, it's not a surprise that the Baltics are nervous about Russia doing the exact some thing with regards to Russian speakers in their territories.
I think they are up to the challenge of whipping up some BS casus belli and scaring would-be protesters into submission.
But if Putin could do that (he can't), railway gauges would be the least of our worries.
As to railways surviving it’s relatively difficult to effectively destroy rail infrastructure. Making the call to cripple your internal infrastructure is tough especially in such a dire situation, it’s also a really large target. Taking out some strategic bridges is easier but most local issues can be quickly fixed when you talking million men armies.
These projects are sloooooooow
Fear is why Finland allied with the Nazis.
Fear is why the Soviet Union also signed a pact with the Nazis and invaded Ukraine.
It's easy to justify anything with fear.
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?
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
You've missed a few significant figures there, Finland's area is: 338145 km2
Your argument appears to be that your enemy's fear driven by losing 27 million people during an invasion/war of extermination is exactly equivalent to your country's fear of weapons that were imagined solely for the purposes of justifying an invasion.
My argument was that it is quite easy to get a domestic population to treat all of the enemy's legitimate fears as utterly irrelevant while treating bullshit domestic fears as existential.
In a way I think you helped make this point for me by forgetting about those 27 million deaths.
If only there was a reason for this.
It's more of mystery why particular kinds of westerners are especially sanctimonious about Moscow while bending over backwards to excuse nearly identical western behavior.
... or maybe because Fins got invaded by Soviets.
Just like fear of "greater finland" made the Soviets invade in the first place.
It's fear all the way down. The only difference is the validity of those fears. Obviously your country's enemies' fears were always invalid while your country's allies' fears were always justified.
And the fear of Poland made the Nazis invade Poland, right?
Their propaganda no doubt presented things this way, but that was far from the truth. Much like Nazis had to stage a Polish attack on German radio station[1] to justify their invasion of Poland, the USSR had to fabricate the shelling of Mainila[2] to justify the invasion of Finland, because neither Poland nor Finland were apparently threatening enough on their own.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_Mainila
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6nigsberg
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
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
https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=gauge&lat=62.774837258...
https://vaunut.org/kuva/174390?tag0=24%7CVgobo%7C
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.
Soon, you might go from London to Köln without switching trains!
I kinda expected India and Britain to use the same gauge, and was a bit surprised.
Also, what's going on in Australia?
No. There was some small lines in Scotland using the same gauge as India, but Britain had a bunch of different gauges and eventually standardized on 1435mm ("standard gauge") as that was the most common one.
I don't recall where I read it, but IIRC there was some motivation that they wanted a broader gauge for India because they were afraid cars would topple over during storms. Or something like that.
> Also, what's going on in Australia?
Each territory built its own railway, with no thought about eventually building a cohesive continental network. In some cases narrow gauge was chosen because it was thought to be marginally cheaper than standard gauge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gauge_in_Australia
Probably more to do with the fact that the first train in Spain was build in Cuba
bast copy of the Subercase report I could find: [1] https://www.agrupament.cat/documents/Informe%20Subercase.pdf
The same happens with the electricity grid, even though it is connected to France, it has very small capacity.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hisatsu_Line
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.
Ideally you would want to do this all over Europe.
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 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.
I think bridge heights are the bigger problem here
At almost every election before this version of Labour got in, the Tories would promise all sorts of rail projects then immediately cancel them after the election.
One project was a goods "spine" (all projects were "spines" at this point), that invovled improving the loading guage from Southampton upwards.
For routes where this happened I don't see why we couldn't upgrade the stations to a bigger loading guage and have double decker trains.
I've noticed all the bridges we get on stations these days are much higher.
I don't know if detailed guage maps exist - it would be interesting to know how many bridges and tunnels stand in the way of reguaging on various routes.
The costs would be high and the benefits negligible. Where more capacity is required, it's typically easier to lengthen existing trains, or run more trains, than to go adapting stations and building new unique double-decker trains that are only going to be compatible with a specific line.
And, as mentioned elsewhere, double-deckers have a big disadvantage in lengthening dwell times (due to less doors per passenger), which could result in slower services.
I rode these kind of trains in multiple countries and continents and there's nothing uncomfortable about them.
Why do you say that?
I agree that they're fine in countries with larger bridges and tunnels -- Amtrak's Superliners are palatial in size -- but not for us. (Except probably for the Channel Tunnel rail link, which is built to French gauge).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR_Class_4DD
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.
If taking over Finland would help Russia, why didn't it do so in 1945 when it was there for the taking, to little protest from the UK and US? Russian had no use for it then, or now, other than the Karelian isthmus, which is part of Russia. Russia didn't raise much protest of Finland joining NATO. These notions of Russia having designs on Finland are loony.
They tried, but weren't able to defeat them completely; a deal / armistice was made in the end.
> Finland lost 12% of its land area, 20% of its industrial capacity, its second largest city, Vyborg, and the ice-free port of Liinakhamari
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland#World_War_II
So little actual difference.
It is trivial to disable and no so easy to fix, especially if Russia has a good supply of drones and missiles (which is the actual issue for them as we have seen in Ukraine).
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?
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.
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
As an austrian, I am amused.
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 :)
But austria and australia regularily exchange mail that got sent to the wrong country.
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.
[1] https://yle.fi/a/74-20161793
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki%E2%80%93Tallinn_Tunne...
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".
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.
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.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge
And more tunnels are getting build.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_fixed_link
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.
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.
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...
I have this feeling that Finland's railway tracks are not set in concrete at street level ;)
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).
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.
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.
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.
No comments yet
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).
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.
That article has a short paragraph mentioning it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44033310
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).
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.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/580-the-legend-of-the-tsar...
Wheels are anyway wearing parts and are to be changed periodically.
BTW, I'm just speculating out loud.
No comments yet
Check back in in a few years and all your questions will be answered.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica#Project_progress
But billions of euros has already been spent.
I imagine you’re looking for the subheadings titled “completed in 2015” and “construction (2017-present)” though.
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.
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 thought this is a project for a new railway, not reguaging existing track ?
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.
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.
There's no defensive reason for this other than in the cabinet talks.
First of all it's not just so easy to destroy infrastructure in a way that can't be rebuilt quickly; thousands of miles of train tracks would be difficult to destroy. This is happening all over Ukraine.
Second, blowing up your own country's rail infrastructure means you can't use it, either, which means you lose an advantage you have that your trains can move on your rails but your enemy's cannot.
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.
Imagine the cost if it was the other way around... Nevertheless, a valiant effort by the Finnish.
I guess we eventually have to do Ukraine (and Iberia?) too, so hopefully the lessons learned can be applied there.
While a downshift if usually much esier since a smaller gauge simply fits inside the larger one so all bridges and tunnels are wide enough by definition.
> The government is expected to make the final decision by July 2027, with construction starting around 2032.
But 89mm is probably too small a margin for that to work.
I assume that changing the gauge also affects other related equipment such as signaling and such, which would make rebuilding much harder.
We did such things in the US in month long long ago.
Which they are, as even a quick search would have shown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eA5oEXEFlI
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/infrastructu...
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torne%C3%A5%E2%80%93Haparanda-...
It's a tradeoff and worthy of deliberation.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-agrees-five-year-dea...
https://militarnyi.com/en/news/eu-top-diplomat-russia-may-at...
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.
That's of course completely impossible but one can dream.
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.
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.
https://greatnews.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/linia-ferata...
[1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qjRZTz3K9sbVYpDX6
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.
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)
You can't announce migration if you haven't decided you plan to migrate...
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.
If you are not doing all of this at once, this likely isn't worth it.
The idea is simple. Ensuring everything is smooth and safe = cost multiplier.
If they build new lines next to existing ones, they need to touch all that stuff anyway. No point in replicating old systems.
The 1520mm was some Soviet effort to "metrify" their railways while keeping compatibility with existing rolling stock.
I also remember reading a long time ago that there were two engineering schools: one modeled that tighter tolerances would decrease oscillations and vibrations and the other predicted exactly the opposite. I think in the end they settled on natural experiments. Hope I didn't make this up, need to search for sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_Class_Sm6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railway...