European Railroad Discussion > The 1520 conference in Vienna and Broad Guage routes in Europe

Until a moment ago, I had no idea that there were Broad Gauge (1520mm) railroads inside countries with standard gauge networks in eastern Europe. I came across videos of the Polish Linia Hutnicza Szerokotorowa, or Broad Gauge Metallurgy Line, which runs about "400 km from the Polish-Ukrainian border crossing just east of Hrubieszów to Sławków Południowy (near Katowice)." (Wikipedia) Videos of it show clearly that Russian freight cars are in the trains, which are quite a bit longer than the usual European trains. There is even a railfan website (and youtube channel) dedicated to the line:

http://www.lhs.pl/

I've wondered about certain examples I've seen of Russian freight cars in unexpected places. I've seen boxcars or refrigerated cars on a photo of a train in Northern Greece from 1995, and in recent photos of Iranian trains, there are Russian looking gons, covered hoppers, and tank cars. I'm guessing in both cases the bogies are changed?

I also came across the proposal to build a broad gauge line to Vienna to ease the bottleneck of Chinese rail freight flowing through Poland which suffers border delays. The 1520mm conference was held in Vienna this year and discussed those issues, and, as this article explains well, the longer train lengths and higher weights that the broad gauge network allows.

https://www.railengineer.uk/2018/04/10/containers-lots-of-from-china/

Overall, that article is a very interesting summary of the rail routes from Asia to Europe and the issues with them. There are routes and upgrades I never knew about, like a 110km new standard gauge route in Turkey to offer another overall route to Europe via Azerbaijan.

This is another interesting route: "By 2021, with the completion of a 164km section of railway in northern Iran, Azerbaijan will also be on a North-South railway route that will take traffic from India via Iran’s Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas to Russia and northern Europe. This will provide a shorter route than the current one through Turkmenistan."

We had a discussion on the extent of the Russian gauge into Europe earlier in the year

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?17,4508823

It works the other way too, Lithuania now has a standard gauge connection to Poland which is supposed to be extended to the other Baltic States to help integrate them into the Western European network.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/18 23:20 by 86235.

Thanks for posting that, I did search but it seems I didn't use the right terms because I didn't find that thread. I saw your photo album from the LHS and it is excellent!