This may be a dumb question but when I check the map, seems really weird because, we need to cross several cities to Kouvola to then go back south to Kotka.

by Sudden-Policy-6789

23 comments

  1. We don’t want the nasty neighbour to have an express railway to Helsinki.

  2. Kotka has 50k inhabitants which is nowhere near enough to warrant a direct train line. Cargo-wise they’ve been served by a busy port which the train line to Kouvola is also originally built to serve (although commuter train O also serves on that stretch IIRC).

  4. why would they make separate direct line to helsinki from small city like kotka?

  5. East-West travel is generally way more difficult than North-South because when the rails were built, we didn’t want the neighbour to be able to move quickly on our rails.

  6. At the times railways were built, they were used to transport goods (mainly lumber and sawmill products) from inland to nearby harbors. The cargo traffic along the coast moved via ship, hence no coastal rail. 

  7. >we need to cross several cities to Kouvola to then go back south to Kotka

    No we don’t. Buses exist.

  8. Did that route last year and switching from the high speed train to the old train where the doors are just swinging open and closed and everything looked 50 years old and I was the only one on the whole train was…. An experience

  9. There have been talks about a new “East Rail” for over 20 years. It would have connected Helsinki and Kotka and gone further to the Russian border. However, Kotka didn’t do well in competition with the other municipalities. Now the project aims to link Helsinki and Kouvola and to be honest it doesn’t make as much sense.

  10. The railroads in Finland are also built a different width as Russia on purpose.

  11. Historically because lines were build inland to avoid attack from the sea, and also to connect the farming and forestry areas to the ports.

    Helsinki-Kotka….there was a plan called Itärata formulated back in the 30s I think to actually run a line via Porvoo and Loviisa, and maybe to the border too. I was talked about even up until the early 2000s that a commuter line to Porvoo should be built from Tapanila, via Söderkulla to Porvoo – and then on to Kotka.

    In the 80s part of the line to Hamina was rerouted to a junction just south of Juurikorpi to facilitate this. Another example is the road next to K and S-Market in Söderkulla called Rautatiekuja — just behind this is a short connecting road which looks awfully like a railway cutting (was built about 5 years ago) – the railway station was supposed to be built where the outside carpark is for S-Market.

    The idea is now dead…it will never happen.

    Instead we have ideas like a high-speed line via the airport and Kerava and then onto the east. At one time, some politicians were even saying that people in St.Petersburg would be the primary users of this route to Helsinki Airport. One green party politician is on record as saying trains would reach 300kmh between a Pasila and the Airport in a dedicated tunnel.

    Unforuntately most of the effort at the moment is on a high-speed line to Turku, the so-called ELSA Rata.

    BTW, there has been massive investment in the Kotka-Kouvola-Hamina line – rebuilding stations, new signalling, a better commuter train service and ERTMS (level 2 IIRC) to allow for big increases in freight traffic. The learnings from this will be applied to other lines in Finland. IIRC, there’s a plan to remove all signalling from the Savonlinna branch line and run that just over FRMCS.

  12. Historically? They didn’t want to build a train line within naval artillery range of the coast. This is why the line to Porvoo (which only runs on special occasions) goes so far north.

  13. Security reasons, east part Finland is “peripheria” and east-west roads and rail network is narrow and even easily destroyable (roads, bridges and rail track is also a trap), so enemy cannot use that own purpose. West and north part is more versatile. In Finland, defence is called “total defence” se even this kind of “whole countrywide” civilian infrastructure is carefully planned as attack in mind. If you check google satellite images, you can see kind of “spiderweb” road network inside every forest at that area. Official plan is “preventing forestfires” but the real plan is, those can use at artillery purposes, if attack came.

  16. It’s almost like they forgot how to build railway lines.

  19. to avoid all the stadi people flooding to meripäivät. its packed enough here with all the kouvola and lahti people

  20. There also exists a railway from Lahti to Loviisa, which is in between Helsinki and Kotka. It’s not visible in the VR map because it only has freight traffic on it. And I’m not even sure about that lately, it has had some issues with profitability.

  21. Much of the railways were built during 1800s and Kotka didnt exists back then. There was place called Ruotsinsalmen merilinnoitus, which had small town and chruch, but nothing important. After the war of 1809, it lost its significance, and the town started decaying. Final blow came after English fleet bombarded whole fort down and only church was left standing.

    Only after industrialition came to Grand Duchy of Finland, and river Kymi was harnessed for industry, was the city of Kotka found. After 1880s agressive Russofication of Finland started, and there were no intents to connect Kotka to St Petersburg via railroad, Kotka was connected to crossroad, that will become Kouvola. (Yes, Kouvola is just glorified trainstation) Well anyways, after Finnish independece, state was poor, and after Ww2, it was seen as safety risk.

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