I remember my return trip with my parents between Helsinki Central and St Petersburg in July-August 2017. The train has free Wi-Fi and a restaurant car. On the way from St Petersburg I have bought ten Fazer candies in an Allegro-shaped box, which I still have in my home.
Finland has 1524mm gauge as it used to be a common standard in Russian empire. Then Soviet Union has changed gauge for 1520mm, but Finland left 1524. And Russia initially got 1524mm from the United States as engineers invited to construct the line between St. Petersburg and Moscow were Americans. There was no a common standard in the US, certain companies used different gauges, and one of them was 1524mm.
hi.. may i ask you? i'll be going from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, so, we don't need tou get out from the train, right? the officer will be stamp passport on the train?
Ekain Munduate thank you sir.. So we will have stamp leaving Russia and stamp enter Finland, right? And we don't move out from train until last stop at Helsinki station?
The difference is insignificant for normal trains, either way. The load gauge is identical as well, save some passenger-only sections. The HST does have an intermediary gauge of 1522 mm though.
Formerly, the standard "Russian" gauge 60"=1524mm existed throughout the whole Russian Empire including Finland. In late 1960s and early 1970s the Soviet Union gradually switched to a new "Soviet" 1520mm standard. The reason is not very clear. From that time on the Russian 1524 gauge remained only on Finnish railways ond on broad-gauge tram systems in Russia and other countries of the former USSR.
Top speed is mostly affected by voltage, on the Finnish side it is 25 kV AC, whilst on the Russian side there is still a gap electrified with just 3-5 kV DC (a remainder from Soviet era, as electric heavy freight or HST were not considered there at all, only light suburban trains back then).
@@EkainMunduate 4mm sounds like something well within the margin of error, especially when the trains still need to operate normally within the rail temperature range of -35C to 50C (when you consider a very hot summer day and the sun parching the dark iron for 20 hours (the sun doesn't really set in Finland in the summer)). That alone would cause a flex of some millimeters here and there, no doubt.
I wonder why there is such a long fence running parallel to the rail track just on the Russian side of the border. Is it just for security purposes or might that be a leftover from the Soviet era when there have been huge border barriers before the fall of the iron curtain?
There has never been much fence direct to the border. The obstacles were further inland during the Soviet era. This gentleman here is looking direct to Russia from his yard, the border is in the small creek that is the also border of his land. www.kaakonkulma.fi/paikalliset/4033379
@@Itapirkanmaa2 This is an interesting picture. But I thought that there is a restricted area in front of the border which requires a permit to enter. Maybe he has such a permit because it's his own land.
Commies removed "extra" 4 mm from Tsarist's 1524 mm to 1) shed some evil remainder of Tsarism from Soviet Russia, 2) to simply round it up to more metric 1520 at expense of old imperial system based on feet and inches. Finns, to the contrary, refused to join the Bolshevist reform. They even keep train movement left-sided.
@@morzh1978 The left side driving only applies for some HSL commuter trains (all except those which are mostly on finnish mainline. Other trains use right side where double tracks are.
Who the fuck needs Swedish announcements at Russian-Finnish train? If there were swedish announcements, then there would be questions like, why those are not in Italian, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese... They had to limit it somewhere, and since the train is traveling between Russia and Finland, Finnish and Russian announcements are logical. If you do not speak either of those languages, there is also one world language, english.
@@Mi-rs1vl Calm down, I'm just saying swedish is used usually because there is a minority of swedish people living in finland and it has been used ever since Sweden had controlled finnish land. It's just a tradition. And yes Sami is also a language from Finland but it is not used outside of Lappi.
