Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

> 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?

> "Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."

Check back in in a few years and all your questions will be answered.

> Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?

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.

This is an ongoing project, not a past project though ?

I thought this is a project for a new railway, not reguaging existing track ?

I think you can ”upgrade” the tracks to use three rails so you can handle both track widths. Also there are trains with adjustabe axle widths.

No visible result is the goal. The change is minimal but makes the system compatible with other EU carriages. Did the Baltics attempt this or succeed?

There are several options nowadays. For instance, the Spanish train maker Talgo holds many patents for variable-gauge railroad wheel systems. Such systems can be used at scale for large projects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_gauge

Currently the leading plan is to build another narrower track alongside the existing ones (so the old trains can keep operating), but it is still in the planning phase. [1] I am not convinced this project is ever going to pay for itself. I feel like you could move cargo from one train to another somewhere near the border for quite a long time with the money it is going to take to convert the entire rail network. Finland is only connected to Sweden and Norway by land in the North so it's not really going to connect the Finnish rail network to Europe either (unless the Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel [2] gets built, but it does not seem likely at this time).

[1] https://yle.fi/a/74-20161793

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki%E2%80%93Tallinn_Tunne...

Not possible here because the widths are too close together to install a third rail.

You’d need four rails, a 9 cm separation isn’t enough to fit two side by side. This solution has been ruled out as technically infeasible (I don’t even want to think about what the switches would look like…)

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).

Wikipedia says 1435 and 1524 are too close for triple rail, you have to do quadruple.

Progress has been made and is ongoing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica#Project_progress

Given the small difference, maybe the easiest option is to "just" update the wheel axles of the entire fleet in the same time and at the same speed as the tracks.

Wheels are anyway wearing parts and are to be changed periodically.

BTW, I'm just speculating out loud.

They're clearly referring to economic results.

> I am not convinced this project is ever going to pay for itself.

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".

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/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.

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.

Part of the motivation is removing the Russian gauge rails such that they can't be used in the case of invasion, so I don't think dual-gauge is really an option here.

Adjustable-gauge are used in Switzerland for a mountain line (Montreux-Interlaken) all through the year. I have never seen temperature issue mentioned. https://www.gpx.swiss/en/stories/technology (the video is rather cool)

This reminded me about a joke.

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.

Correct it is a new rail line not an alteration of existing tracks, but it goes into some existing and new (mostly cargo) stations so some stations will have both gauges of track.

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.

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

It is ongoing project but there doesn't seem to me enough financing, the money that EU allocates only cover about half of the required budget so they are looking for investors.

Assuming Russia waits 30-50 years until Finland has new tracks :))

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 wonder if those trains was imported from Italy ? During the Danish transition to IC-4 some of those trains ended up with Gaddafi in Libiya (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/02/this-was-gaddafis-pers...)

Toronto has 83 km of TTC-gauge streetcar track. 99% of it is set in concrete. This would take a little longer than 2 days.

I've read your link. Where's the actual progress?

But billions of euros has already been spent.

Don’t OBB Railjet trains travel at 230km/h?

> 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 Ireland).

Well, the last Russian invasion of Finland was over 80 years ago, and presumably Russia will continue to exist in some form..

Australia, not Austria ;)

North Korea !

That article has a short paragraph mentioning it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44033310

What leads you to believe Ireland will introduce standard gauge?

That is cool, thanks for posting!

If the proposed Cork-Dublin-Belfast high speed line (the 300km/h one, not to be confused with Irish Rail's _other_ more short-term project to bring Dublin-Cork to 200km/h standard, which will use the existing line) goes ahead, it'll almost certainly be a new standard gauge line, separate from the existing ones. Huge 'if', of course.

Nevertheless that’s what the initial feasibility studies showed. I don’t think the amount of complexity involved in that Swiss system would scale at all.

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 work is very much ongoing in Lithuania: 114 km of railway is under construction, with tracks already laid in large parts of it. That is 43% of the initial phase (links to Poland and Latvia).

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.

It is not a minor delay and in case of war such a delay can easily cost billions.

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.

No, they're Spanish trains: the Talgo Avril (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talgo_AVRIL, https://youtu.be/6iFfVpZwLJ4?si=ahxuQnauNw1-ucqR). It's a model specifically designed for that.

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.

> 300 km/h trains connecting Finnland with Spain with no delay or bumps?

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.

I can count on one hand how often I've seen that mixup happen in that direction.

As an austrian, I am amused.

Couldn't they build something similar to the eurotunnel but with denmark and sweden?

I hadn't considered throughput but that's a good point. Under normal circumstances even a few hours is meaningless but if you need to get lots of trains across the border in a short span of time it starts to accumulate.

  > Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?

Another large scale infrastructure change right in Finland (or was it Sweden?) was the switch from driving on the left hand side of the road to the right hand side of the road. They actually had local citizens one night dig up street signs and move them to the other side of the street.

Is it Austria that has the stands in the airport for tourists who thought they were buying tickets to Australia, or is it the other way around?

There is a bridge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge

And more tunnels are getting build.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_fixed_link

I am not familiar enough with air travel that I can say either way.

But austria and australia regularily exchange mail that got sent to the wrong country.

Oh. I should've looked it up before making a statement on it. My apologies and thanks for the correction.

I think it's a myth that originated from an ad: https://www.vol.at/2023/11/397526796_1104257417472438_811840...

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 :)

Estonia / Eastern Europe uses the Russian gauge.

Yeah, I meant the northern way, but a tunnel into the baltics, or a normal, peaceful landconnection over St.Petersburg would of course make more sense for connecting Helsinki. Or connecting Helsinki with Stockholm via Åland.

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...

Yes, that’s how things work. You spend money on projects before their completion, just like you buy ingredients for dinner before a meal arrives on your plate.

I imagine you’re looking for the subheadings titled “completed in 2015” and “construction (2017-present)” though.

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 ;)

They'll probably go line by line.

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.

I doubt you've read the link since there are 3 sub-headers that explain the progress.

Today is 2025. Rail Baltica started in 2013.

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.

Does that train have the British Advanced Passenger Train in it's ancestory? The carriage shape that is narrower at the top looks familiar.

You are counting from some early planning phases. Compare, for example, how long it took for the UK to build High Speed 1 line.

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.

It will take that long for them to replace their military stockpiles.

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.

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

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...

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.

Problem with line by line is you need to have gauge switching systems someplace - line be line means you are moving all that.

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.

Sounds like a variation on the "Tsar's finger" anecdote

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/580-the-legend-of-the-tsar...

> 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.

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).

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.

The need for that is pretty much a given with this change. I don't think it's avoidable.

Rail Baltica will connect the Baltics to European rail network using 1435mm gauge. It is scheduled to be fully operational in 2030.

While not completely avoidable, it is partially avoidable if you carefully plan. Moving all your gauge change equipment is expensive, so if you can avoid one that is worth a lot.

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.

The Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel would be expensive, but in the current climate of hostilities with Russia, the EU could support it just to make a point.

It would also enable high-speed services from Finland to Central Europe - Rail Baltica to Tallinn is currently being built, so Helsinki-Warsaw could be a plausible connection, doable in less than 8 hours. (More than ideal, but trains that run for 8 hours from one end of their journey to another are commonplace in Central Europe.)

This is a lot easier to do with wooden sleepers than with concrete ones. You can drive new nails into wooden sleepers almost at will, so you can keep the sleepers in place and "just" move one rail to a different position. Concrete sleepers have pre-fabricated holes for the indicated gauge, which means replacing them.

German soldiers re-gauged Soviet railways on a very short notice too when Barbarossa started.

The idea for the Baltics is that east-west lines can remain Russian gauge but north-south lines (esp. new ones) are European gauge.

Discussions of a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel suggest that Finland would at least lay European gauge tracks to Espoo and Helsinki-Vantaa airport, and maybe also to Tampere.

I've read that (not tracks but) stations are the sources of big overruns for Rail Baltica.

Apparently people confuse cities when flying too, here’s an article about a passenger going to the wrong Sydney, and more examples:

https://simpleflying.com/ameican-airlines-passenger-flies-si...

Most of the work was not done over two days, it says they did a bunch of prep work before the two days to minimize the downtime, and besides being done within two years they didn't specify how long the prep work.

As the Finns will presumably not permit Russia to do prep work on the rails in advance of their invasion, they'll have to do all that prep work after the invasion. The article doesn't say how long that two years of prep would actually take if needed ASAP, but if it would take a month then the Finns would have a huge boon.

That bridge is going to be incredibly easy to destroy, should a big enough country wish that. And it definitely isn't going to be rebuilt quickly enough to matter for a war.

> 300 km/h trains connecting Finnland with Spain with no delay or bumps?

Have you seen a map of the region?

With nukes, you can destroy anything. Otherwise the kerch bridge is still standing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge

Russia does not want that bridge to fall. Ukraine likely does but wasn't able to execute (outside of artillery range by now, limited access to long-range missiles, utter lack of sea power in the area, failure to anticipate circumstances enough to take it out while they still had control over area). All other countries are trying to not get involved, including not selling Ukraine (many) long-distance high destructive power missiles.

I wouldn't generalize from that to "nobody could destroy a bridge".

Wow not even a verbal slip up I literally read Australia as Austria. Equally impressed and horrified with myself

Building a machine, if it doesn't exist, to rapidly make small holes in concrete shouldn't be hard.

"I wouldn't generalize from that to "nobody could destroy a bridge".

Moving goalposts?

"That bridge is going to be incredibly easy to destroy"

Of course bridges can be destroyed. Also Ukraine would have succeded by now, if it really would have changed the war and justify the efforts.

(It doesn't anymore, since russia has the land train connections)

But it really ain't "incredibly easy", if that bridge is guarded. The failed attempts document as much - and Ukraine knows how to destroy things by now.

It is not just holes. I didn't want to analyze the entire problem in full, but FIY, this is how a concrete sleeper looks like:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dayaen...

As you can see, the entire shape of the sleeper is adapted to the expected distance between rails.

In contrast, a wooden sleeper is just a straight log with no pre-made bumps for rails.

Paint them! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleis#/media/Datei:Mariazeller...

And/or build them like this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Schienenauszugsvorrichtu... ,

or this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:SchienenauszugMitLzb.jpg ,

or this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feste_Fahrbahn#/media/Datei:Oe...

It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breather_switch

There are metal sleepers that sit on a concrete pad. The challenging part is the rail is encased in concrete that enables drivers to drive over the tracks.

Getting to the sleepers would take weeks of jackhammering plus more time to repour the concrete.