Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

Here's a much better article from the Finnish public broadcaster giving more context: https://yle.fi/a/74-20161606

My comments:

The important thing to note that at this point it's just a political posturing and an announcement of intent. They haven't shown any concrete technical plan how this would actually be executed.

> "Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years. Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."

Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.

>Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.

It is not that hard. Countries like Spain have already two different gauges and have the necessary technology in the trains to change between different systems.

One of the main goals of this is to not have the russian gauge available in case russians attack, so that logistics deeper into Finland cant happen easily with the same train, so backwards compatability is not desired.

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.

Russian military logistics _heavily_ depend on trains, everything that can go on a train, does so. Flight and vehicle stuff is mostly an afterthought.

Any hindrance we can put on the Finnish-Russian border to stop them just unloading 12 cars of fresh troops in the middle of the country is a good thing.

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

Compare this to the completely bonkers logistics of the US Military: https://youtu.be/iIpPuJ_r8Xg

Even Unicef has a massive logistics center in Denmark with pallets of stuff categorised and ready to be sent for any emergency: https://www.unicef.org/supply/warehousing-and-distribution