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Finland gains direct rail link to Europe this summer (yle.fi)

submitted 7 hours ago by tuukkah@sopuli.xyz to c/finland@sopuli.xyz

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When a long-awaited rail link opens between northern Finland and Sweden, it will be possible to travel some 5,000km by train from Portugal's Algarve to Kolari in Lapland – Finland's northernmost station.

"The grand opening of this route will hopefully be just before Midsummer in late June," Sampo Kangastalo, development director of the northern Finnish city of Tornio, tells Yle News.

A deal signed on Friday between the two countries aims to unlock the missing link plugging Finland into the European rail network: a short distance between stations in the twin border towns of Tornio and Haparanda, which for decades has only been possible by bus or car.

Opening that bottleneck has required many years of bureaucratic and budget wrangling as well as electrification of the old train line between Kemi and Haparanda.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20220038

(You could also walk the 4.5 km between the currently operated railway stations across the border.)

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[–] tuukkah@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

Yes, the word Europe has multiple meanings. I think it's quite typical to talk like this in Finland as, although we are physically located on the European continental plate, we are quite remote and mostly separated from the rest of it by the Baltic Sea, by Russia and by the sparsely populated north. Case in point, you'd think the Finnish train connections would've reached the "European" railway network by now and you could travel by train to Portugal (like you can from Estonia), but no. Also, when the EU commission talks of a plan "Connecting Europe through high-speed rail", there's nothing in Finland - which makes sense, because high-speed rail doesn't make that much sense in Finland unless you build the tunnels to Tallinn and/or Stockholm.

(Other meanings: Often when something is said about Europe, it actually only applies to the EU countries. And when people talk of European languages they mean a subgroup of Indo-European languages, so they don't consider Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and the Sami languages.)