Martin HoffmannWe’re a little late,* but we’re already Toruń.**
* We got stuck on the previous stop of Solec Kujawski for fifteen minutes or so.
** I’m sorry.
Toruń is as far as I will go today. The main station is on the wrong side of the river, though, so would involve a twenty minute walk. Or, if you are lazy and/or booked yourself a room right behind Toruń Miasto station, you could take this suspiciously familiar looking thing for two minutes.
Toruń strikes me as worth spending a bit more time at then arriving after night fall and leaving after breakfast. Very pretty old town with lots and lots of churches.
It is also the birthplace of one Nicolaus Copernicus, inventor of the quantity theory of money (and maybe some other things).
Good morning! Before we continue our journey east, here’s the crossing of the river Wisła which was hidden in the dark last night.
One thing that is cool about eastern Europe is that everyone used the same basic signalling system. So I can tell you that we will be leaving with 40 then line speed without knowing Polish rules.
Quick transfer in Olsztyn where they have a shiny new (if a bit sterile) station building.
The aforementioned Copernicus worked as an administrator here, so they named the new station for him.
My impression of PKP Intercity is that either everything is fine or a complete disaster with little in between.
Korsze. It’s a mere twenty kilometres up line 353 to the Russian border and onwards to Chernyakhovsk, which should be called Wystruć or Įsrutis, from where, in a better world I could continue to Klaipėda. Instead we turn southeast towards Ełk and Białystok along a newly renovated line that The Map still shows as not having passenger service. Some corrections are, apparently, required.
That was a fun journey. Until about Ełk the landscape is unexpectedly varied – very hilly with forests and many little and one big lake and things. After that it calms down substantially and becomes more flat and open.
I definitely can recommend going to Białystok this way.
I believe the centre of Białystok is fifteen minutes that way, but the map is inconclusive whether there really is one.
Let’s try something else instead. There is a local service heading northeast departing pretty much right now.
This train has Wifi but no suspension.
Sokółka. The train continues to Kuźnica Białostocka right by the Belorussian border. I would have time to go there and come back for my actual train, but I am not sure how relaxed Polish officials are these days. Better to spend an hour here.
The line continues straight to Vilnius as part of the old Petersburg Warsaw Railway, but as it has to cut through a corner of Belarus to achieve this, we have to do a detour to what is known as the Suwałki Gap, a 65 km stretch of border between Poland and Lithuania a bit to the west, named after the town of Suwałki where incidentally my next train ought to run to.
Is this a broad gauge track? This should be a broad gauge track. Does someone have a tape measure?
(There is a broad gauge line parallel to the standard gauge line to about 25 kilometres from the border with various transshipment facilities along the way. Revitalised in 2014, is there even any traffic now?)
I think the Polregio guard just now claimed that Interrail is only valid on the Intercity but then let me stay without further discussion because language barrier.
Although after ninety minutes on this thing I might wish to have waited for the Intercity.
Is this the stuff? It was the only bottle I could find in the somewhat disappointing (and certainly missplaced) Carrefour.
(Edit to add: If so, I get the hype.)
Start of the line on a new day.
You know you are way east in a time zone when the sun is well up already at half six.
The morning train to Mockava, just past the border about a half hour away. It starts here in Suwałki at 07:00 and subsequently has barely more passengers than staff. My assumption is that it only exists so train and crew don’t have to overnight in Lithuania. Kudos to PKP Intercity for not running it empty.
Mockava station. It clearly was never built as a border station and the village of Mockava is five kilometres away. But this is how far south the broad gauge network reaches, so we – all three of us – have to change.
In theory, standard gauge continues all the way to Kaunas but the Polish trains aren’t certified and I think signalling is missing or something.
Till-o-mat@partim
No "sto gram" for you tonight?
No "sto gram" for you tonight?
@swoonie I may also have bought a bottle of beer for a nightcap … (The beer selection in Poland is insane!)
Wrzlbrnft
Bjørn Nordbø
Patrick Dersjant RCX@partim Insert gap here.
波鉄 (Hatetsu)@partim It's quite ironic how important it is these days, considering it was originally built as a kind of half-circle connecting the towns of Suwalszczyzna/Suvalkija to the Warsaw-Petersburg railway. It ran Grodno/Hrodna-Augustów-Suwałki-Šeštokai-Alytus-Varėna (the present-day Sokółka-Dąbrowa Białostocka section was added after the area was divided by a border, unsurprisingly)
@HaTetsu The borders in this area are really not railway friendly. In Lithuania, Kazlų Rūda – Šeštokai had to be built after 1918 as well.
Phil Dennis-Jordan@partim Visiting Białowieża National Park has been on my bucket list for a long time… one of these years! Good to know getting close to it by train is entirely feasible.
@HaTetsu I remember and thought I had processed those already. I think the plan was after finishing Denmark but that keeps dragging, so I will reconsider.
@partim To complete the tour, you'd need to visit Frombork, but that hasn't been served by rail in a while, sadly
@HaTetsu Also, apparently Bologna, which must have been quite the trip back then.
Tor Lillqvist@partim Mikołaj! Had no idea his name is written with an M in Polish.
ifrauding@ifrauding I thought so, too!
@partim In the background, an underpass that *used to be* double-track, but there was no room to maintain that with electrification, so now it's a tiny single track section on an otherwise doubled line
@HaTetsu Ah, I was wondering. Makes sense.
@HaTetsu Although, looking aerial imagery, it seems they could have just cut it open and put a bridge for the street up top. Or were there buildings there previously?
@partim They could have, but in the mad rush to electrify as much of Poland's network as possible after the 70s oil crisis, such works were judged too slow and expensive
@partim Another piece of trivia - I believe it was only a couple years ago that PLK regulations were amended to allow using a plate instead of painting the whole pole of free-standing non-full-auto main signals. Not that I've seen that happen yet