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Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

(yle.fi)
461 points axelfontaine | 1 comments | 20 May 25 07:40 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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thih9 ◴[20 May 25 08:17 UTC] No.44039085[source]▶
> 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?

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jabl ◴[20 May 25 08:59 UTC] No.44039376[source]▶
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.

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1. Qwertious ◴[20 May 25 21:23 UTC] No.44046063[source]▶
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.