Cross-border railway problems are annoyingly universal

At the time of writing, my #CrossBorderRail project has taken me to 419 international railway lines since 13 June 2022.

One of the very first borders I went to - on 19 June 2022 - was Haparanda 🇸🇪 - Tornio 🇫🇮 (OpenRailwayMap) at the very northern end of the Baltic Sea.

Little did I know that now, four years on, we still do not know when passenger trains will finally cross this border bridge.

For here, like in dozens of other places I have been to in this massive project, solving even the simplest cross-border railway problems turns into a drawn out saga.

In 2022 the station at Haparanda, Swedish side, had already been renovated and the standard gauge track from Boden electrified. But nothing had yet happened to the broad gauge tracks from Tornio in Finland:

A quick recap as to what has, and hasn't, happened.

Planning to electrify the cross border section and run passenger trains from Kemi to Haparanda started in 2020.

Renovation works on the cross-border bridge, and electrification works, started in late 2022 (shortly after I visited) and were done by early 2025.

In summer 2025, everything was ready... and nothing happened.

And then a month ago, in April 2026, Finland's minister of transport, said services would start "this summer"... and so far nothing has happened, no start date confirmed.

Yes, there is a track ready for passenger trains that has been standing there for over a year now, and there are still no passenger trains.

Now this one is getting especially annoying, personally.

I need to give a speech at an event outside Helsinki on 26th July - just two months from now - and is there going to be a new railway to take?

And as, for the hell of it, I have worked out the longest train journey in the EU. That uses the Tornio - Haparanda connection. But who knows when it might finally be possible?

No-one can tell me.

The journalist at Yle who wrote about it doesn't know. People I have enquired with inside VR do not know. Nothing has been agreed yet is all I get.

Is anything even being prepared, or not?

Is there any chance this is going to happen this summer, or not?

Was the Minister just talking without any knowledge when she said it would open?

No responsibility, no accountability, no decision making ability.

And while Haparanda - Tornio is on my mind right now, these sorts of problems repeat all over the place. From Tornio to Valença do Minho 🇵🇹 to Bitola 🇲🇰 to Tantow 🇩🇪, the same issues.

For the moment the only certainty: there is at least a night train every night to Helsinki from the mosquito infested Tornio-Itäinen, an inadequate tiny halt for these border towns that deserve something better: