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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

#301

Post by franktankbank »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #272
MyPasswordSucks wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#302

Post by jcranmer »

npteljes wrote: post #160
thrdbndndn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

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

#303

Post by sidewndr46 »

iggldiggl wrote: post #239
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#304

Post by iggldiggl »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #280
iggldiggl wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inst…

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.

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

#305

Post by lazide »

StefanBatory wrote: post #228
pydry wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It's such a mystery why all neighbours of Russia hate Russia and Russians. If only there was a reason for this.

Experience.

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

#306

Post by firesteelrain »

lazide wrote: post #295
DocTomoe wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

'86, in the south? Let's not be racist and assume the labor was Chinese - surely it was 95% recently freed black slaves paid almost nothing + 'free' prison labor. (/s, a little).

This was 20 years after the Civil War. It consisted mostly of skilled and semi-skilled workers laborers that were White, African American and other immigrant labor. Chinese laborers were mostly concentrated in the West not the South. The reconstruction of the southern rail network involved many people who were part of the Southern economy and employment structure at that time

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

#307

Post by sidewndr46 »

kibwen wrote: post #145
adrianmsmith wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

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.

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

#308

Post by barbazoo »

mikewarot wrote: post #49

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.

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