Russia's new high speed railway between Moscow and st. Petersburg

I wonder if even heavily sanctioned Russia with their own 'HS2' from Moscow to St. Petersburg (679km with up to 220mph speed) will be done before HS2 will even be in operation. Currently the cost is around 19 billion pounds and some parts are already under construction according to openrailwaymap.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said construction on a new high-speed railway between Moscow and St. Petersburg should commence.

Trains on the new line would run consistently at 250 km/h (155 mph). Travel time from one city to the other is expected to be less than two-and-a-half hours...

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Russia does "benefit" from a much clearer political decision-making process, of course. They also won't need to worry about lineside neighbours protesting or launching legal challenges being a major hold up, so long as the man that matters says go.

I'm far from an expert on Russian rail industry, but I expect the sanctions on rail will have limited impact as Russia can run railways pretty much self-sufficiently. Some of the computing stuff will be hit by sanctions but building a railway won't be majorly held up. (Safe operation of said railway is a different issue).

I wonder what Ural Locomotives will come up with as a 400kmph train, as they have never made a multiple unit and nothing faster than 75mph. They share some parts with Siemens like traction packages but will probably have to skirt sanctions to build high speed trains with western parts.

zwk500 said:

Russia does "benefit" from a much clearer political decision-making process, of course. They also won't need to worry about lineside neighbours protesting or launching legal challenges being a major hold up, so long as the man that matters says go.

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Being the country with the world's largest landmass helps, there are plenty of places to build. In the unlikely event an old babushka protests, they can be dealt with easily. I also imagine they skip the environmental consultancy, they can do geological surveys quickly and skip the rigorous steps we take. There will be no transparency and local communities won't likely be involved in a multi stage consultancy process either.

But given the service speed of Moscow St Petersburg on the Sapsan is 155mph having another completely new faster line seems generous, but there may be the demand as domestic travel has increased a lot in Russia since sanctions.

Russia is generally much more competent than other European countries when it comes to railway projects. They get things built much quicker and run their railways a lot better. So i am positive that this will be up and running before HS2 starts.

It looks like this new high speed line will bring the Moscow to Saint Petersburg journey time to just 2 Hours and 15 Minutes total. Currently the fastest trains are the Sapsan trains (which are still considered high speed trains) which take 3 Hours and 45 Minutes to do the Moscow to Saint Petersburg which is already quite fast. The slower traditional sleeper trains take about 8 Hours to do the route or it takes about 18 hours if you want to do it entirely by multiple local Elektrichka trains.

If I understand correctly, the existing high speed line they have is not so much a new line as it was an upgrade of their existing line, meaning that it shares traffic with all other train types. I can imagine that it has some capacity problems.

Amalie said:

If I understand correctly, the existing high speed line they have is not so much a new line as it was an upgrade of their existing line, meaning that it shares traffic with all other train types. I can imagine that it has some capacity problems.

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Yes it is basically just an existing railway line that was upgraded to allow high speed 140mph to 155mph running. But as you say that means it shares tracks with other trains. Even local slow stopping Elektrichka units share the tracks for a good percentage of the route. Russia does a very good job of running their railways reliably so normally this is not really an issue. I have yet to come across any delays. But it probably causes delays on the odd occasion.

China is almost self-sufficient when it comes to high-speed rail.
As long as China didn't sanction Russia -> Russia can go forward with such a high-speed line.

Wonder; How could this new line even be shorter=faster as the existing? We learnt in secundary school at history that when asked for this to the Czar of the day he drew a liner and laid it on a map between the then and now still biggest 2 cities in Rossye/Russia and drew the line along it-as straight as str8forward can be!?
Agree that Rossye/Russia is well able to furnish all its needs for railway transport in house and probably also even has all the raw materials for building it somewhere in that huge country. And just send out a spy-or 2-to copycat the innovations for it thought out in the west-as was common practice during all those years of hammer&sickle red socialist/communist rules.

dutchflyer said:

Wonder; How could this new line even be shorter=faster as the existing? We learnt in secundary school at history that when asked for this to the Czar of the day he drew a liner and laid it on a map between the then and now still biggest 2 cities in Rossye/Russia and drew the line along it-as straight as str8forward can be!?

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I believe the story of the Tsar/Czar is at least partially apocryphal, not least because the line isn't dead straight as can be seen on maps.

Looking on ORM there are plenty of speed restrictions. The current line has a speed generally between 200-250kph but dropping to 120kph in places, so building a dedicated 350kph line would cut an appreciable amount of time off a journey of that length.

RailWonderer said:

But given the service speed of Moscow St Petersburg on the Sapsan is 155mph having another completely new faster line seems generous, but there may be the demand as domestic travel has increased a lot in Russia since sanctions.

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It may have changed but I'm pretty sure they stop all other traffic some time ahead to ensure a clear run for the Sapsan, which has a big impact on the capacity for everything else

With no formal access to western parts/spares for the aircraft operating their domestic airlines, it makes sense for them to build high speed rail where they can. I am sure they will have learned something from their years of sapsan uasge.