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Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

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Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#251

Post by bluGill »

pjc50 wrote: post #38
radicalbyte wrote: post #26

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.

> 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.

Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#252

Post by MyPasswordSucks »

shaftoe wrote: post #226
close04 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#253

Post by celticninja »

kranke155 wrote: post #207
paddy_m wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a debunked post I think.

i dont believe it is.

Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#254

Post by marcthe12 »

rsynnott wrote: post #86
thih9 wrote: post #3

> 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?

> 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 Irela…

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

Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#255

Post by bluGill »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #65
jabl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#256

Post by Hilift »

yason wrote: post #229

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 th…

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

Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#257

Post by celticninja »

FpUser wrote: post #187
kibwen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

>"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.

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

Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#258

Post by nradov »

IAmBroom wrote: post #225
rmind wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

#260

Post by bluGill »

arnsholt wrote: post #108
andriamanitra wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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