International railway connections between the Baltic states

In the Newsletter this week
Follow the record attempt live - from Monday 7th September
European Rail Passengers Union - now open for membership!
Analysis: International railway connections between the Baltic states
Good week: Velvet gets its operating license
Bad week: More Talgo headaches in Spain
Photo of the week: Old narrow gauge rolling stock at Tootsi, Estonia
Elsewhere this week: Story about the record attempt in Berliner Zeitung, and quoted by Spiegel

Newsletter 029, Friday 4th September 2026.
Subscriber-only newsletter, sent every Friday at 14:00 CET/CEST.

Follow the record attempt live - from Monday 7th September

7th September I will start the record attempt - Longest train journey in the EU. There are 3 links to help everyone follow the project:
longestjourney.crossborderrail.eu - the project background
longestjourneylive.crossborderrail.eu - all the live updates from the ground
livemap.crossborderrail.eu - direct link to my current GPS location

European Rail Passengers Union - now open for membership!

For months I have been working to establish a new organisation - European Rail Passengers Union (ERPU). This is a membership organisation, working on cross-border railway problems Europe wide, as a complement to the work being done by national associations and European Passengers' Federation (that ERPU will eventually join as well).

Now all the bureaucracy to establish the organisation is done (we are a ASBL (non profit organisation) in Belgium), it is finally possible to join the organisation as an individual, starting at just €12 per year.

You can also follow ERPU on the Fediverse, and Bluesky.

International railway connections between the Baltic states

So my #CrossBorderRail work in the Baltics is done. This week, heading north towards the start of the record breaking trip, I managed to get to all the borders between Lithuania and Latvia, and Latvia and Estonia that I have been missing until now:

Three borders I have been to this week were notable.

The first is Eglaine 🇱🇻 - Obeliai 🇱🇹 that is on the line between Latvia's second city Daugavpils (77k population) and Lithuania's fifth city Panevėžys (85k population). At the moment only freight trains run here. It is an orderly single track line, not electrified.

The problem: how many people want to go from Daugavpils and Panevėžys, with not too much in between?

Here we might get an idea in a few years once Rail Baltica opens in Lithuania, giving Panevėžys a north-south railway. And that would benefit Daugavpils - take a train on the existing broad gauge line to Panevėžys and change onto Rail Baltica there. You can just about see it working.

The case for passenger trains is even harder to make at Renge 🇱🇻 - Mažeikiai 🇱🇹.

This as well is a freight only line at the moment, but one with a fraught recent history - this is the line that Lithuania completely dismantled between Mažeikiai and the Latvian border to prevent Polish petrochemicals group Orlen (that owns a refinery in Mažeikiai) from exporting its goods by rail to Latvian ports. News about the 2019 re-opening from Orlen here, and background from Railway Gazette here.

Having dismantled the line in 2008, Lithuania was forced to re-construct it, having lost a case at the EU Court of Justice about it, citing anti-competitive behaviour. The project to design and reconstruct it took three years (of which 12 months of actual construction), but Lithuania rebuilt it all to the same standards as pre-dismantling. I found track sections manufactured in 2002:

And level crossings were re-built to rather old fashioned standards too:

So while there is a line, and there is freight from the Orlen refinery to Latvia again, the case for passenger trains here is very weak. Renge, on the Latvian side only had 1 or 2 trains a day in the early 2000s, and until you get to Jelgava population is very thin. So I much hope for passenger trains here and Rail Baltica will not help with this one.

Then the third interesting border was Mõisaküla 🇪🇪 - Ipiki 🇱🇻 - it was one of the missing links cited in Michael Cramer's 2015 report that started me off on this whole research project (see this blog post for background). Back then I did not understand why Cramer had included Mõisaküla - Ipiki at all, and now having been there I still have no idea.

OK, the line was only closed in 1996 (having only been converted from narrow gauge to broad gauge in 1981 - it ran only 15 years!) but you would need to reconstruct almost 100km of railway, through very sparsely populated areas, and roughly parallel to the future Rail Baltica.

So this one was hopeless, but I am glad I proved my assessment from the map was correct.

Of the other lines, at least at Priekule 🇱🇻 - Skuodas 🇱🇹 and Vainode 🇱🇻 - Lūšė 🇱🇹 you could find some abandoned tracks, but there is no prospect of change here:

At Ape (border Mõniste 🇪🇪 - Ape 🇱🇻) there is a monument to the former railway. But there, and Valka 🇱🇻 - Mõniste 🇪🇪 back into Estonia there is no prospect of re-opening a railway that closed in 1970:

And the others - all former 600mm World War I lines - Akniste 🇱🇻 - Rokiškis 🇱🇹, Subate 🇱🇻 - Obeliai 🇱🇹, Eglaine 🇱🇻 - Czarny Brod 🇱🇹, Nereta 🇱🇻 - Suvainiškis 🇱🇹 and Rucava 🇱🇻 - Šventoji 🇱🇹 - there was nothing to be found.

But now, tired after more than 250km cycling at borders in the Baltics and with plenty of bus rides in between, I have a complete picture of what does and does not work, where.

And so to the headline picture from the newsletter - Elron and LTG Link DMUs at Valga. In 2022 when I made my first #CrossBorderRail trip through the Baltics, such a connection was not possible, and today it is, and it is heavily used. With Daugavpils - Vilnius likely to re-open from December (see last week's newsletter) there is steady progress in this region. Just not, for now, at the borders I went to this week!

Bullshit Meter: GoVolta to run high speed trains Amsterdam - Paris

Read more about this one at Trip By Trip and Treinenweb. GoVolta's expansion plans, using classic locomotives and coaches, make sense (especially Netherlands to Paris). But the high speed plans, supposedly from December 2028, do not - due to the absence of suitable rolling stock. The only high speed trains available secondhand is the ICE3M 406 series - known to be unreliable, and now no longer approved for France either.

All previous Bullshit Meter posts can be found here.

Good week: Velvet gets its operating license

From 2028 French private rail company Velvet (previously known as Proxima) wants to rival SNCF TGVs on the Bordeaux - Paris route. And this week they received their licence to operate.

The communication around this has been interesting - SNCF leaves 15% of passengers behind, Velvet says. This is not literally leaving people in the platform, but is a number of passengers who would like to take trains but cannot because the offer is too low (trains sold out) or prices too high. Velvet has at least identified the right problem.

Whether their solution is right, well, time will tell. Opting for Alstom TGV-M trains, the same SNCF itself has ordered, and a train type that is quite inflexible to deploy leaves Velvet looking like a private copy of SNCF's offer, with not much differentiation. But just as Trenitalia has forced SNCF to up its game towards Lyon and Marseille, so Velvet should do the same between Paris and Bordeaux.

Bad week: More Talgo headaches in Spain

Having abandoned plans to run the Talgo 106 series to France, Renfe has pondered running these dual gauge trains to or even just in Portugal instead. But now there are more problems with the series - Trenvista reports more cracks in the bogies have been found, taking 2 trains out of service.

By now it is a pretty hard and fast rule: buy modern trains from Talgo and they will not operate reliably.

Photo of the week: Old narrow gauge rolling stock at Tootsi, Estonia

A picture from a previous trip to Estonia - some old narrow gauge rolling stock parked up and rusting at Tootsi. This small town will get a new Rail Baltica station (OpenRailwayMap).

Elsewhere this week: Story about the record attempt in Berliner Zeitung, and quoted by Spiegel

I spoke to Berliner Zeitung about the record attempt, and I was quoted in Spiegel about the prospects for Trenitalia and Italo entering the German rail market.

Photo Rights

All photos by Jon Worth, except Velvet pic - from Velvet website.
Bullshit Meter images always have photo rights listed directly on the image.