GUWonder

The financing for new nuclear plants in Sweden should be less of a problem than the financing for domestic high-speed rail. Energy-hungry “industrial” Germany can pay for the former.

It’s not a financing trade-off dilemma that is driving the death of the very high speed rail plans which the previous M government in Sweden also wanted. Sweden is becoming increasingly like the US with NIMBY types who see government-funded mass transit on the ground as being there to serve “the other” and opposing it on very much similar grounds as found in the US.

CPH-Flyer

Considering they don't have a millimeter of high-speed rail so far, hardly surprising that they don't want to start investing now. But I guess they could optimise their standard rail operations further.

fassy

Yeah, how about a second track between Kristianstad-Hässleholm-Lund.... I don't know how many times I was stuck on that line... signal failure, broken down train blocks the rails,.. etc. All these issues and a lot of "near missed flights" made me switch back to the car for going to CPH.

nacho

NIMBYists, I know what you are talking about. It might make sense to connect Stockholm, Gbg, Hbg , Malmo and evt. CPH with high speed rail - if you can get from Stockholm C to Copenhagen C in less than 4h then there's no reason to fly.

US is a huge country and the place where high speed rail makes sense would be linking DC, Baltimore, Philly and NY. Coastal California might make sense but the distance is an issue.

Fredrik74

It's more about high speed rail being a very, very stupid idea. There are only three cities where it would be commercially viable and it's a disaster in waiting to try to use land for the tracks between them without even building stations.

Fredrik74

Some people with direct knowledge of the situation say Trafikverket and its contractors are working on it. It looks like there's a backlog since earlier years though...

nacho

The route from Malmo to Simrishamn has been like that for years too.

I'd say 4 if you count in Hbg, maybe a Malmo, Hbg, Gbg and Sthlm and eventually to CPH. I kind of make sense if you take the 3 West coast cities and maybe heading up to the border to Norway (pretty similar distance from Gbg to Sthlm anyway) and then let NSB to build it from the border to Oslo. It's a HUGE project and I don't know how many projects Trafikverket can handle. I know the E65 project to turn the whole thing to a motorway has been postponed for a long time now.

I know a family relocated to Sweden from Spain to work on the rail track improvement between Malmo and Lund, and when I asked him how bad it is and he said nothing had been done for years so it was bad.

GUWonder

The rail problems in Sweden have seemingly gotten worse in the last 10 years. Not that its much consolation, but the main train stations in the country have become better-looking facilities -- and seem to have become better retail revenue generators because of that -- during the last ten years. A lot of the main train stations in the country were a lot less attractive facilities 10-20 years ago than they are nowadays. [Something Sweden has done better than Denmark. Cue: CPH-Flyer. ]

Even the Malmo-Lund section too often involves bus replacements. And even when the Skane side works at times on Malmo-Stockholm, too often I've seen problems on some other stretch of the journey. But in squelching the high speed train plans for the country, they don't seem to be doing so to add all that potential funding amount to boost the robustness of what they have and supplement it with back-up lines.

The level of solidarity within the country is way down the drain and this will have consequences for how infrastructure spending does and does not take place. And when the ground infrastructure fails to be reliable and well-maintained, just watch the worse than useless finger-pointing and scape-goating to take place.

Swedavia, however, should be sort of an exception on the infrastructure investment scene, as Swedish air infrastructure will have slimmer opposition. That and energy infrastructure.

FlyingMoose

Sweden's rail network is fine as it is, you can get between the three relevant cities in a reasonable amount of time and you can get to most cities in the country within a day. There is even competition on the STO-GTB stretch.

International flying however is a disaster and needs attention and investment.

GUWonder

How is the international flying a Swedish disaster?

AY is the latest to have found ARN to be a long-haul business flop. And so now we've had Finnair, SAS and Norwegian all come around to realizing that the demand for ARN as a long-haul hub is insufficient to make for a great business case. And it's not like GOT and MMX can do any better than ARN with long-haul flight demand out of Swedish airports.

While I would have loved to have a IAD-ARN non-stop flight and some of the other long-haul CPH routes replicated out of ARN, ARN just can't support what even CPH struggles with at times. Government subsidies for long-haul routes aren't going to effectively create passenger demand that doesn't exist.

the810

The network is ok-ish, the demand between Stockholm and Gothenburg/Malmö would justify faster services. However, the world doesn't end at the border. Increasing speed to Malmö would make train a reasonable choice for destination further west/south, where flying is essentially necessary these days.

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nacho

Yeah, with too low demand making a disaster for those who live close to ARN.

ARN doesn't get the same pax number compared to CPH. CPH has the whole Capital region/Zealand and Fyn + the Swedish side. ARN has greater Stockholm, Uppsala, Linkoping, Norrekoping but they don't really make up the same # of pax compared to CPH, plus there's a low fare airport in Norrekoping to compete with ARN.

the810

Don't forget KLM out of Linkoping.

nacho

Really?! It's amazing with 2 departures per day! I think AF used to fly to MMX but they stopped as CPH is only 45 minutes away.

It's not just KL, Czech Airlines is flying from LPI to PRG too.

GUWonder

I try to avoid MMX like it’s the plague, even when it’s cheaper to reach than CPH. KL used to be at MMX during part of the Clinton Admin, but that KL service is long gone from MMX.

KL@VXO I used to see. But it got discontinued again during the pandemic, isn’t coming back this year, and isn’t even slated to return at all. LPI has two KL flights scheduled today. But VXO has two FR flights today, one to Spain and one to Poland.

MMX has Poland and the Balkans covered.