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If you're interested in EU cross-border rail connections, I highly recommend following Jon Worth on Mastodon. He spends a lot of time actually testing the various border routes (and has some pretty strong opinions on them).
Wouldn't really benefit from this living in Helsinki, but this would be an amazing thing nonetheless
Yeah exactly!
I'm curious to see how much impact it will have on flying and international car traffic.
Undersea tunnel to Tallinn let's go!
Signed it!
Poor Finland and Ireland though, I don't think they're getting HSR comnections anytime soon
Neither are the southeast Balkan countries (GR, BG, RO), or the Mediterannean island ones (MT, CY).
Running a line through Hungary-Romania-Bulgaria-Greece should relatively be much easier though
In theory yes, but:
- Greece is not ready to handle HSR.
- Bulgarian and Romanian accession to Schengen is still contentious, so what's the point of HSR if you have to stop for passport checks?
- Nobody is going to give Orban's Hungary big infrastructure bucks.
EU politics is so much fun! :)
Maybe not high speed, but you could theoretically run a train line from Helsinki to Talinn and Stockholm. In Southern Denmark you could take the train from Rødby to Puttgarden, across the narrow stretch of water that separates Denmark and Germany. The train would just roll aboard the ferry, and then exit at the other end. As far as I know, that line has been closed down temporarily, and will run through the tunnel they're building, when it opens up again.
More realistically, you could work to improve the train-ferry connections. The train should take you all the way down to where you board the ferry, there shouldn't be long waits when you switch from one mode to the other and it should be seamless to purchase a ticket from Helsinki to Berlin, even if part of the trip is on a ferry.
Of course not as fast as traveling over land, but it makes more sense considering the geography, and I personally think it should count as a train connection, if the ferry is included in the train ticket.
Ireland is probably a bit more tricky.
Train ferries a bit logistical hassle through and are pretty slow and costly afaik. Another person linked a proposal for an undersea tunnel between Estonia and Finland which would solve that problem, but connecting to Sweden without a ferry is still tough, unless they decide to invest into a similar project or construct a high-speed all the way around the Baltic Sea through northern Scandinavia which is probably not really feasible.
There are multiple companies running routes between Stockholm and Turku or Helsinki, as well as Helsinki and Tallinn, and they can be fairly cheap to use. It really just is a matter of improving the connections, if you want people to be able to continue on to other European cities. A tunnel or a bridge would be ideal, but they are a big investment and you can make it work without.
I used to travel from Denmark to Åland (between Finland and Sweden) and back a couple of times a year as a child, and have also occasionally continued on to the Finish mainland. The train ride though Sweden is not bad and neither is the boat ride, but having to use three different ticketing systems, making sure you have enough but not too much time, and just that you know where to go and have your tickets in order, can be.
What about the different railway widths?
From what a quick Google search / Wikipedia hunt showed me is that most of the EU (with the exception of Russia and Finland) are already running on "standard-gauge railway" for their high-speed rail
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-gauge_railway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_Europe
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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