Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

Post by pydry » Wed, May 21, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #390

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…

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

Post by firesteelrain » Wed, May 21, 2025, 8:55 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #443

firesteelrain wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a more nuanced and historically grounded point, whereas your post was a sarcastic oversimplification. So no — you didn't say what I said. I emphasized the diversity and complexity of postbellum labor in the South; you gave a glib summary that oversimplifies it as mostly “recently freed black slaves paid almost nothing + ‘free’ prison labor.”

Your point is flat out misrepresenting the situation. Especially by listing White workers first. At that time, the only white workers in the south who would have been moving rail and driving spikes would have been on a prison work detail or in a similar severely legally compromised situation. Even getting white workers to couple cars didn’t happen until much later.

Post by eru » Thu, May 22, 2025, 2:24 AM UTC

jabl wrote: post #81

eru wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Do you have more sources?

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

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, May 22, 2025, 3:00 AM UTC

RileyJames wrote: post #66

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Post by xattt » Thu, May 22, 2025, 11:22 AM UTC

iggldiggl wrote: post #269

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

Earlier 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.