I stumbled upon the Rail Baltica project this week.

It’s a plan to build a standard gauge railway from Warsaw across the three Baltic states to Tallinn, a total length of around 950 km.

You may not have known, but Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia ended up with Russian gauge tracks after the Soviets took over the show in 1944. Whereas most of Europe has standard gauge:

The gauge is the distance between the two rails. To pass from one gauge to another, you basically have to either change trains, or lift them up—wagon by wagon—at a border and fiddle the distance between the wheels.

Variable gauge trains that can slip and slide between two gauges do exist but are rare. Poland has actually had one running to Lithuania for night trains and some freight transport in the past.

The first step to connect the Baltic states to the standard gauge zone (i.e., “Europe”) was the completion of standard gauge tracks from Bialstok in Poland to Kaunas in Lithuania in 2015.

Now it’s full-on planning is to get the standard gauge tracks built right through to Estonia for 2026, with further construction starting next year.

The trains will have a top speed of 249 km/h because 250 km/h was taken already.

This new railway should—by accident or design—mean the end of flights between Tallinn and Kaunas (it will be 3.5 hours by train) and perhaps even flights from any of the Baltic states to Warsaw, given the likely evolution in attitudes towards short-hop European flights over the next 7 years.

Public consciousness has changed massively in just the last year. Let’s see what seven can do.