Alternate mainline railway alignements

Inspired by Devvy's great threads in the Post 1900 forum about alternate rail management & developments in the UK and the US in the latter half of the 1900s I got to thinking about how railway mainlines might have been built along different alignments in the first place back in the 1800s - especially here in Sweden but also elsewhere. In Sweden the mainlines would probably have been very differently planned if the fear of invasion (from across the Baltic Sea) hadn't been so strong - or at least not as decisive for the planning of the railways. Another planning idea was to create new towns & potential cities where rail lines met instead of making existing cities the hubs (thought was that more towns was better than fewer, bigger ones).

My thought has been that with a POD involving what groups held sway over the decisions of how the lines were designed the railways could have been aligned differently. E.g. the Line Stockholm-Göteborg might have shared tracks with the Stockholm-Malmö line all the way to Jönköping before heading west to Göteborg via Borås (similar to the proposals/plans for HSR nowadays). Also, with some forethought straighter alignments might have been procured even if they hadn't been built at the time (i.e. a straight ROW created by the government realizing tech & costs would change over time). I'm thinking the effects over the years of such differences would have been quite profound on the country's economy. Or am I way off the rails? (pun intended and a bit forced)

Similar thoughts have of course occurred to me regarding the UK. What if the mainlines had been centrally planned from earlier on? Instead of corporations trying to out-do eachother (and also hinder the competitions attempts), the government had had a plan for needed connections and maybe laws in place to help the companies that got the concessions to force people to give up land so lines could go even straighter than they do? Would this have have had any direct effects in terms of which cities and towns would have grown over the years? Would the overall economic growth change? Or would such effects have been so small that they wouldn't really impact things like urbanization patterns?

/had to get these thoughts out of my head before gong to bed.
 
I don't know a whole lot about this sort of thing, but the thing with the UK is that geography probably played a big part in the choices. In the sense that a North / South mainline is easier than an East / West one. Although a good POD for my hometown would be having the East Coast Mainline not go through it, that could be interesting, although I'm not sure there are any other likely routes (going through Lincoln or Nottingham maybe I suppose, instead of those being on a separate line?).
 
In Germany, politics could have made a big difference in many aspects of railway building. Without Prussia as the administrative heart, it is likely we would see a western network oriented along a north-south axis instead of one centred on Berlin. The main arteries would be 'HaFraBa' (Hanseatic Cities - Frankfurt - Basel via the Ruhr and Rhine valley) and Brandenburg-Saxony-Bavaria-Austria. THe east would be a relative backwater. Also, without the politics of Hamburg as an unwilling member in need of bribing, it's likely there wouldn't be the Elbe bottleneck. There would be more bridges across the river much further up, in Mecklenburg at the latest, and most likely more direct connections north-south.
 
^Germany! yeah, different politics and different borders in the Germanies in the mid 1800s would make for in some cases drastically different rail lines. I wonder how many old alignments that only really got built due to how the borders were are still in use.



Here's a little sketch of how the Swedish mainlines could have been drawn if there'd been a few different prioritizations. One thing is the less km of rail needed to get Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö connected, which should make at least that triangle cheaper and faster to build - could well have been seen as more important than OTL when planning.

The change is basically a line going Göteborg-Jönköping instead of Göteborg-Örebro.

28v3h4p.jpg
 

Devvy

Donor
Get rid of WW2 in some fashion, and rail development is going to be massively different all over Europe. WW2 ran the railways in to the ground with the years of, in effect, total war.

Similar thoughts have of course occurred to me regarding the UK. What if the mainlines had been centrally planned from earlier on? Instead of corporations trying to out-do each other (and also hinder the competitions attempts), the government had had a plan for needed connections and maybe laws in place to help the companies that got the concessions to force people to give up land so lines could go even straighter than they do? Would this have have had any direct effects in terms of which cities and towns would have grown over the years? Would the overall economic growth change? Or would such effects have been so small that they wouldn't really impact things like urbanization patterns?

The problem with the central planning is it kind of flies in the complete opposite direction of British policy - which was (and still is) "let the private sector do it if it can". This central approach was done by France, and it led most companies being allocated for Paris and out in a certain direction. This led to a situation where much traffic between two cities in different regions would have to travel via France, as there were few interconnections between networks. While privatised sprawl did have it's inefficient drawbacks, it did lead to a decentralised coating of the UK in rail which was largely a good thing. Different rail networks would have had an impact on some towns (Swindon, York, Crewe) which were largely "train towns" - centred around employment at railway works, but probably would not of made a lot of difference to most. Rail connected industrial places, which were centred around iron and steel deposits, or around trade gateways.

Many of the railways were curved as well due to the land topography, and a need to keep the line flat for weaker locomotives before the powerful ones came in later years. Something which would later hinder us with the curved railways keeping top speeds down. :( Ironically, one of later built straighter (and thus higher speed) lines shot almost non-stop largely from the south to the Midlands would be closed down for pretty much those reasons (as it was non-stop, it didn't stop at many intermediate towns) - the GCML.
 
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It would be easy to get the Canadian transcontinental to follow otl's CN through Saskatoon and Edmonton rather than the otl southern route through Regina and Calgary.

When van Horne started driving straight west, there was no pass known that he could use. It was a huge gamble, and anyone sane might not have taken it.
 

Devvy

Donor
If we're sticking to Post-1900, a large alternative could be the development of an actual high speed passenger network along the Corridor in Canada.

Windsor - London - Mississauga - Toronto - Kingston - Ottawa - Montreal - Trois Rivieres - Quebec City.

And maybe a branch from Toronto - Hamilton - St Catherines - Niagara Falls.
 
It would be easy to get the Canadian transcontinental to follow otl's CN through Saskatoon and Edmonton rather than the otl southern route through Regina and Calgary.

When van Horne started driving straight west, there was no pass known that he could use. It was a huge gamble, and anyone sane might not have taken it.

By the time Van Horne was building the CPR, Sanford Fleming and Major A.B. Rogers had already found southerly routes through the Rockies, and more to the point Van Horne rejected the original route surveyed by Fleming, which was largely later followed by the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Western's lines, which were later merged into Canadian National Railways. Once the Spiral Tunnels were built in 1909, that line made the most sense economically. Remember that the final destination of the transcontinental mainline was Port Moody, which is just east of Vancouver. Going way to the north via Edmonton add hundreds of miles to the route and does nothing for additional traffic.

If we're sticking to Post-1900, a large alternative could be the development of an actual high speed passenger network along the Corridor in Canada.

Windsor - London - Mississauga - Toronto - Kingston - Ottawa - Montreal - Trois Rivieres - Quebec City.

And maybe a branch from Toronto - Hamilton - St Catherines - Niagara Falls.

CN got as far as they could possibly go at the time with the UAC Turbotrains, which were in service both cursed with terrible luck (one hit a truck on its very first run, and fires cursed them repeatedly), and their replacements were slower and less advanced. Make the Turbos a bigger success and with better reliability and make the LRCs be Gas Turbine-powered units, perhaps with a diesel motor for slower speeds, and you may well be able to have CN and VIA go for in service 120 mph speeds. Success here could mean justification for a TGV-style separated route on the Windsor-Quebec City corridor in the late 1980s, with the system built and operating by 2000.
 

Devvy

Donor
CN got as far as they could possibly go at the time with the UAC Turbotrains, which were in service both cursed with terrible luck (one hit a truck on its very first run, and fires cursed them repeatedly), and their replacements were slower and less advanced. Make the Turbos a bigger success and with better reliability and make the LRCs be Gas Turbine-powered units, perhaps with a diesel motor for slower speeds, and you may well be able to have CN and VIA go for in service 120 mph speeds. Success here could mean justification for a TGV-style separated route on the Windsor-Quebec City corridor in the late 1980s, with the system built and operating by 2000.

As we've probably discussed before, Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal would form the first stage/backbone of any potential services, and would probably need to be built incrementally. First stage would be separate higher speed tracks in the city approach, so that trains can run faster and not get caught behind other trains when running into central Toronto or Montreal. Then gradually adding more and more high speed track between the areas and through Ottawa.
 

katchen

Banned
I realize that the major reason for the Southern route was to keep an American railroad like the Great Northern from building on it. Also because Canada was more or less tied to the Fraser Valley as a terminus because the grade through the Chilcotin River to Bute Inlet and across the Georgia Strait at Quadra Island to Vancouver Island was considered to steep for trains at the time. But tell me. Could a route down the Kleena Kleene and Knight Inlet to Vancouver Island have worked to reach Vancouver Island with a possible terminus at Port McNeil or Port Hardy making the Northern Route feasible earlier in addition to the Southern Route? Could a more northerly route along the North Saskatchewan River to Athabasca and thence to the Peace River Region, crossing the Rockies at either Pine Pass or Peace River Canyon and then either progressing up the Rocky Mountain Trench to the Yukon and Alaska (possibly terminating at Port Heiden or Port Moller, ice free on the Alaskan Peninsula or at Valdez with a branch to the goldfields of Nome and the Noatak) or crossing over to Ft. Fraser, the upper Skeena and then the Nass River Valley to the Pacific have been feasible?
 

katchen

Banned
^Germany! yeah, different politics and different borders in the Germanies in the mid 1800s would make for in some cases drastically different rail lines. I wonder how many old alignments that only really got built due to how the borders were are still in use.



Here's a little sketch of how the Swedish mainlines could have been drawn if there'd been a few different prioritizations. One thing is the less km of rail needed to get Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö connected, which should make at least that triangle cheaper and faster to build - could well have been seen as more important than OTL when planning.

The change is basically a line going Göteborg-Jönköping instead of Göteborg-Örebro.

28v3h4p.jpg
I see that the mainline goes down by Helsingborg. That would make a tunnel to Sjaelland more inviting and possibly another, longer tunnel from Sjaelland to Fyn and/or Fehmarn, putting Scandinavia directly into Europe, with Denmark's cooperation of course. I could see a well financed PRIVATE (or public-private) railroad using this Scandinavian backbone to push east from Kemi to Oulu, Archangelsk, Vorkuta, Igarka, Turukansk, Tura, Yakutsk then south with one branch going to Tyndaski, Dzalinda and into Manchuria to Beijing and deeper into China with another branch going to Nikolaevsk na Amur, deKastries and across the three mile Tatar Strait to Sakhalin-Karafuto connecting with Japan's rail system.
A third branch could go through Northeast Siberia if the engineering was possible, via upper Kolyma and Chukotka, and either ferry across the Bering Strait or via two 30 mile causeways and a bridge to Alaska, Canada and the United States, hooking up with America's Union Pacific which wanted to do the same thing in 1903 and was even raising money to do so.
It actually is not all that difficult to build a railroad across permafrost, since the railroad bed is made up of crushed rock and the spikes are simply hammered into the permafrost. Building roads for wagons or motor vehicles across permafrost that don't turn into mudholes in the summer are far more difficult. Railroads just have to be careful to avoid building on muskeg--swampland with a cap of vegetation that appears solid but will give way if there is enough weight.
 

Devvy

Donor
I see that the mainline goes down by Helsingborg. That would make a tunnel to Sjaelland more inviting and possibly another, longer tunnel from Sjaelland to Fyn and/or Fehmarn, putting Scandinavia directly into Europe, with Denmark's cooperation of course. I could see a well financed PRIVATE (or public-private) railroad using this Scandinavian backbone to push east from Kemi to Oulu, Archangelsk, Vorkuta, Igarka, Turukansk, Tura, Yakutsk then south with one branch going to Tyndaski, Dzalinda and into Manchuria to Beijing and deeper into China with another branch going to Nikolaevsk na Amur, deKastries and across the three mile Tatar Strait to Sakhalin-Karafuto connecting with Japan's rail system.
A third branch could go through Northeast Siberia if the engineering was possible, via upper Kolyma and Chukotka, and either ferry across the Bering Strait or via two 30 mile causeways and a bridge to Alaska, Canada and the United States, hooking up with America's Union Pacific which wanted to do the same thing in 1903 and was even raising money to do so.
It actually is not all that difficult to build a railroad across permafrost, since the railroad bed is made up of crushed rock and the spikes are simply hammered into the permafrost. Building roads for wagons or motor vehicles across permafrost that don't turn into mudholes in the summer are far more difficult. Railroads just have to be careful to avoid building on muskeg--swampland with a cap of vegetation that appears solid but will give way if there is enough weight.

Sorry, what!?

I agree with you on the Scandinavian part. Bridging from Sweden to Denmark at Helsingborg would be a nice addition, and would probably make operations easier rather then looping through Malmo and into Copenhagen.

But building and operating across the far north of Russia!?!?

Why not just do the usual of railways to Moscow and across the rough Trans-Siberian route. Then the railway actually serves towns and cities along the route, helping to provide ROI on the cost of it. A crossing of the Bering Strait just isn't feasible in the 20th Century, and is probably only marginally possible now, let alone the costs involved in such a project. That'd be astronomical.
 

katchen

Banned
Edward Harriman, CEO of the Union Pacific, thought such a crossing was feasible. So did a lot of investors who put some money into the project in 1903. The reason the project did not get built (or at least attempted) was the Russo Japanese War broke out in 1904, and following that war, from what I have been able to piece together, conservative Russian nobility who had control of Northeast Siberia (Count Plehve, I believe) used America's even handedness in mediating the Treaty of Portsmouth to get the Tsar to veto the project. Plehve was worried that a railroad in the area would cause uncontrollable gold rushes and cause him to lose control of that land, or so the conjecture is.
And of course, when Communism came in, it became more difficult to get anything truly major built in Russia. Not to mention the interference of the Cold War with Russia in a project of that nature when it came to the United States.

To answer your question: Yes, a Swedish consortium might have feasibly built a more southerly Trans-Siberian railroad 20 or 30 years sooner than it got built. A direct railroad running Murmansk-St.Petersburg-Odessa would make a great deal of sense too.
 
The line between Melbourne and Sydney is a nightmare of twists and turns and huge sections capable of only 60km/h, it is some 25% slower than it needs to be. However the current alignment is a result of deviations built at about the turn of the century because the previous alignment was too steep. However if the old alignment was used today our current fleet of trains would be some 12% quicker between Melbourne and Sydney.

So perhaps keep the old alignments in service as backwaters until the XPT enters service in 1980 and whammo, we have a quasi-fast train service between our two largest cities.
 
Edward Harriman, CEO of the Union Pacific, thought such a crossing was feasible. So did a lot of investors who put some money into the project in 1903. The reason the project did not get built (or at least attempted) was the Russo Japanese War broke out in 1904, and following that war, from what I have been able to piece together, conservative Russian nobility who had control of Northeast Siberia (Count Plehve, I believe) used America's even handedness in mediating the Treaty of Portsmouth to get the Tsar to veto the project. Plehve was worried that a railroad in the area would cause uncontrollable gold rushes and cause him to lose control of that land, or so the conjecture is.
And of course, when Communism came in, it became more difficult to get anything truly major built in Russia. Not to mention the interference of the Cold War with Russia in a project of that nature when it came to the United States.

To answer your question: Yes, a Swedish consortium might have feasibly built a more southerly Trans-Siberian railroad 20 or 30 years sooner than it got built. A direct railroad running Murmansk-St.Petersburg-Odessa would make a great deal of sense too.

The early 1900's was a time of great human dreams when it came to imagining future engineering projects that may not have been 100% feasible with the technology of the day. The western world thought we could do no wrong with technology until Titanic came along and shattered many of our preconceptions. Case in point Cecil Rhodes liked to "paint the map British red" and once declared: "all of these stars ... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets." This is the same man who wanted to have a railway connecting capetown to Cairo.

Ironically his dream may be completed not by the English, but rather by the People's Republic of China....


It would be easy to get the Canadian transcontinental to follow otl's CN through Saskatoon and Edmonton rather than the otl southern route through Regina and Calgary.

When van Horne started driving straight west, there was no pass known that he could use. It was a huge gamble, and anyone sane might not have taken it.

With regards to the CPR's decision to look for a new route from the south it was a better business decision to go through Regina and Calgary. Not only did it prevent potential American competitors from entering the Canadian marketplace, but it also dramatically decreased the overall length of the route which meant that the CPR had to ask for less money from the government when it started to run into financial problems. The land was more fertile, and it also probably had higher populations in comparison to the northern route which = more freight, passenger, and mail business for CPR.

Note, when GTR attempted the same thing during the first world war (the northern route as you wanted CPR to take) the government had to nationalize the railway because it also ran out of money on the Pacific stretch.

Get rid of WW2 in some fashion, and rail development is going to be massively different all over Europe. WW2 ran the railways in to the ground with the years of, in effect, total war.

Strategic Bombing affected railway development a lot more then ground combat, but if you can butterfly away that then of course you can change how things developed. European nation's would have more developed railway networks not having to repair everything that was being bombed by the Allied air forces...
 
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IIRC there was some discussion of a midland rail route up the centre of the South Island of New Zealand. IOTL the mainline runs up the eastern coast, following population centres, which makes sense.

The midland route was meant to connect the upper/west coast of the South Island to Christchurch and beyond and was largely built, but I think there may have been talk of pushing further southwards through the Mackenzie Country, Upper Waitaki Valley, across into Central Otago and down then to the line pushing westwards from Dunedin.

Given OTL's development it probably would have gone quickly bankrupt and been unsustainable, but it would have been one of the world's more spectacular train journeys
 
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