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Rail Baltica

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deltic

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As the previous thread has been closed I am interested in knowing how far construction works have got and is it possible to see any of the major work sites. I don't know if its related but I see Bialystok station in Poland is presently being completely rebuilt.
 
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dutchflyer

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Was in Kaunas and Vilnius last summer (early aug) and did not see anything related there.
As such Bialystok was mostly the main last major stop/junction to go to what is now Byelorus and once the main line to Leningrad from the DDR.
But it seems there is a rolling program to kind of rebuild/expand about any major IC-station anywhere in POland.
 

deltic

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Construction work is underway at Riga station - looks like new platform, entrance and trackwork which is branded Rail Baltica.

Riga station itself is very rundown, most platforms have no shelters which must be tough in bad weather. To make it worse to access the station you have to go through a very modern shopping centre.
 

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stuu

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In Estonia they have built a number of the overbridges - there are a number south of Tallinn visible on Google Maps/Streetview, but that's about it
 

Cloud Strife

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As the previous thread has been closed I am interested in knowing how far construction works have got and is it possible to see any of the major work sites. I don't know if its related but I see Bialystok station in Poland is presently being completely rebuilt.

Poland is generally going down the path of transforming stations into shopping centres with platforms attached.

In terms of Rail Baltica, Ełk is being reconstructed, but otherwise much of the route is still not being worked on. Warsaw-Białystok should be upgraded to 200km/h in the nearish future, and Białystok-Ełk should be next, but I wouldn't expect anything to happen between Ełk and the LT border until at least 2026 or later.

However, it's worth pointing out that in Poland, 200km/h track means in practice 130km/h, because of a ridiculous and completely unnecessary rule that anything above 130km/h requires two man operations in the driving cab. PKP Intercity are struggling to find and finance drivers, so the end result is that secondary routes are being run at 130km/h despite rolling stock being capable of operating at line speed.
 

TheGuy

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Nope, or technically true only to some limited extent. Briefly, it's 130 km/h only if there is no ETCS on the line (even ETCS L1LS, but it's used only on one line which tops up at 120 km/h, the rest is L1 or L2, if it's L1 then usually it uses no infills, so then you get the usual L1 over-enforcing driving experience), but what's more important, is that in Poland trains cannot exceed 160 km/h, when the line (or the vehicle) is not fitted with ETCS. If there is ETCS in both, you're free to drive the line speed, be it 160 km/h or 200 km/h, with a single driver in the cab.

As an interesting fact, Poland, in fact, did some trickery calling their own old system called SHP (Samoczynne Hamowanie Pociagu, literally Automatic Train Braking) a "class B" system according to the EU regulations (proof: https://www.era.europa.eu/system/files/2022-11/List of CCS Class B systems.pdf, and class B systems apparently are everything bar ETCS, even if they provide features very much alike ETCS L1, like German LZB). The problem is, SHP does nothing except triggering additional dead man's switch check every passed signal - it uses only one resonant frequency which is completely independent of the signal. It seems in the old days (80s?) there were some plans for making it a real train protection system, but apparently this was too much of a task to ensure right electromagnetic compatibility for that with diverse systems used in signal boxes throughout Poland and it seems that they gave up.

Such restictions aren't also only specific to Poland. On DB Netz network, one cannot drive over some speed, when there's no LZB nor PZB on the line. And this speed, is... 100 km/h. So, given that there is no real train protection system on Polish lines unfitted with ETCS, maybe this restriction does make some sense? (I'm not making a definite point on this, though, personally I have no opinion on this issue, and the Polish railway industry lately seems to be very divided on that)

As a finishing note, what I wrote above refers to the PKP PLK network, but there isn't a lot of other owners' railways in Poland, particularly with line speeds above 40 km/h, except some light railways which may go up to 70 km/h, but as far as light railways usually go, it's reached with no or minimal signalling (another curio: because of much more diverse usage of the light railway network in Poznan, Poland in latest years, traditional, manual, physical token "signalling" is currently used on less-utilised some parts of it, and apparently, is doing its job pretty great).

(in the proof link I've posted above, there's also a mention on Polish "radio-stop" system, which is a dirt simple system based on sending a predefined constant DTMF sequence over analog radio which forces emergency braking of all trains which have heard this sequence, not a very good thing to rely on, as if the radio in cab is tuned to another channel, that's enough to make it miserably fail, and radios in signal boxes usually are programmed to be confined to one channel, but anyway, this little "system" has saved careless signallers' and drivers' arses numerous times, sometimes saving human lives and rolling stock, as well)
 
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