A new passenger rail service connects Finland to Sweden, creating for the first time since the 1990s a land rail link running between northern Finland and southern Europe.
The resumption of Finnish cross-border trains, interrupted in 1988, will allow connection between Oulu, on Finland's northwestern coast, and Haparanda, in Sweden, where passengers can take trains and lines heading west towards the Norwegian Sea or south, via Stockholm, all the way to Portugal.
Transshipment is necessary because Finland uses a different rail gauge than the European standard. This characteristic, inherited from the era of the Russian Empire, creates a technical difference that prevents the direct passage of conventional trains to Sweden and the rest of Europe without a change of rolling stock or track adaptation, a legacy of the period when the Nordic country was an autonomous Grand Duchy integrated into the Russian Empire in the 19th century.
