This train goes up

[topum]

The train from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova to Bucharest, the capital of Romania takes slightly over 13 hours. The distance is around 285 miles. Yep, that's below 22 miles per hour on average. Moldovans and Romanians will not be taking any prizes for the fastest trains from the Japanese any time soon.

The border crossing and customs take over three hours because the wheels of the train need to be changed at the border due to the rail gauge difference between the two countries. The USSR had different width rail tracks from the rest of Europe as a defence measure to prevent European trains from being able to cross its borders apparently. Moldova used to be part of the USSR, Romania wasn't. The wheel change involves lifting each of the carriages up one by one (with all the passengers still inside them) and, well, changing the wheels. I think that provides for a very rare opportunity to move vertically up in a train carriage.

Here you can see the wheels waiting for the next train at the "wheel changing station" at the border:

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

!!!!!!!!

This may be the single most amazing thing I have learned from all your posts about Moldova.

THEY LIFT THE TRAIN AND CHANGE THE WHEELS EVERY TIME. JUST IN CASE OF BEING INVADED. BY TRAIN. INVASION BY TRAIN IS THAT SCARY.

That is a level of quite unimaginable paranoia. Wow.

[(Anonymous)]

They are not afraid of it anymore but it is too expensive to change all the tracks. During the Soviet times, yes apparently they thought that that would be an additional obstacle to invasion and occupation by the west.

[topum.livejournal.com]

That was me above, I got logged off and did not notice.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Wow. Still wow.