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.
Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
271–280 of 465 posts
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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 fr…
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.
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#273Earlier 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.…
> "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.
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#275> 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…
> 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.
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#276This 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.
> 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.
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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 vario…
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?
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Amazing. I wonder if one can do anything like this with the current concrete sleepers and thermite welded tracks.
Probably not, but laying track or replacing sleepers is a very satisfying to look at, fully automated process.
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).