By train to Riga

Submitted by Looduskalender EN on Sat, 26.11.2016 - 12:49
Autorid

Text Kristel Vilbaste
Photo from Vikipeedia
Translation Liis

Image
Tartu railway station, 2014
Body

The railway station building in Tartu in 2014

When I lived at the Peipsi shore for seven years train travel in Estonia became unfamiliar to me. There were simply no trains to Mustvee. From time to time we collected birch whisks and picked wild strawberries from the old railway embankment.

The only railway trips during that period I made in Europe, mostly from an airport to the city. Once, yes, I travelled a longer distance by train, from Malaga on the Spanish sun coast to Cordoba. Train travel was slower than by air, more troublesome and actually probably more expensive.

But this year I had again more visits to Tallinn and it was quite pleasant to chug along in the morning train from Tartu to Tallinn. Sitting drowsily at a steering wheel and with the morning slipperiness would have been quite risky too. Going by bus it is rather tough to stay for two and a half hours with your knees crooked between two seats. Moreover bus is more expensive.

Last Thursday however it happened that for going back from Tallinn I did not manage to get a ticket to the train by mobile, evidently there was some software glitch in the virtual world.

The bus left 45 minutes earlier too and so I bought one of the last expensive bus tickets for myself. Sitting down behind the VIP curtain in my seat I discovered that I had forgotten my headphones at home. Usually, using the Internet on the bus for half the travelling time  I listen to some interesting lecture from the Tartu University TV page. There are very interesting presentations about holy sites in nature for instance.

Maybe then I will have more time to wave to the springs, I thought, after all at the Tallinn-Tartu road old holy springs are lined up: Saula Blue Spring, Tuhala Witch Well, Sepa Spring, the Prandi Springs.

Two polished-looking men sat next to me and started  talking with great pleasure about the recently spent vacations, golf courses around Malaga, workouts. Despite the urgent request of the bus driver they did not fasten their seat belts. Well, what can you do with businessmen. Then the conversation veered to the millions that were needed to build something. I tried diligently to fall asleep, I have been taught from childhood that it isn’t nice to listen in on the conversations of strangers.

Sleep in a bus being what it is, in periods I was in the world of sleep, but suddenly I heard from the seat next to me that it would be easy to increase the speed on the Tartu-Tallinn line to 160 kilometres per hour. For this only some ten millions here and there would be needed. In Tallinn there was also some problem with railway stations but about this a report was requested from someone by phone. The main problem was said to be that neither Latvia nor Lithuania was interested in a train service to Estonia or to Europe. Each country was minding its own affairs. The men had an animated discussion about nobody really wanting to go by train to Europe, only a service to Riga airport was actually needed.

If you are in a small metal box like a bus and willingly or unwillingly hear such talk, you become interested in who are talking and why. The more so since I blame myself every now and then that I have not as a journalist taken up the environmental effects of Rail Baltic and the fact that the railway line will be built across sacred  springs. Maybe this was Nature’s reproof to me.

But today’s virtual world is all-powerful, and googling showed quickly that the railway director and Elron’s head man had decided to go together by bus to Tartu to report to the Tartu council members whether a train connection via Tartu to Riga would be feasible. By bus! And a train would leave three-quarters of an hour later. Even by that it would have been possible to arrive in time for the council meeting.

I will leave untold the stories from internal life in the railway corridors of power which were generously told within hearing of all in the nearby seats, but it did annoy me that journalists were seen as evil spirits who kept prying in everything. Two slide presentations were discussed particularly, these would be shown to the Tartu councillors but not to journalists who would arrive only after the meeting anyway.

It was interesting to note how the more talkative railway man who was sitting next to me suddenly stared for ten minutes at a particularly colourful table. What it showed I tried not to look at. Anyway, somewhere in Kärevere, passing the Emajõgi river, he made a call to one more employee and was unexpectedly told that in Latvia it is already possible to go from Riga to Valga by a train that can do 120 kilometres per hour. And also that going from Tallinn to Riga by way of Tartu is not significantly longer in kilometres than by way of Pärnu.

I cannot deny that this talk raised plenty of questions for me. And a continuous wish to advise the loud-voiced men rather to go by train, listening ears are further away there.

Anyway, at some point they slipped off  the bus at the Tartu City Hall and a few hours later a sad news item appeared in the Tartu Postimees, the headline said:  “ Cold shower for Tartu people. No point in dreaming about a Riga train.” And the article itself said: “If Rail Baltic comes at all, then by way of Pärnu, it is common knowledge. Nobody lobbies for the Tartu-Riga train line. This the members of the Tartu city council were told by two representatives of the state railway – Director of Development at Estonian Railways, Anvar Salomets and chairman of the Elron (Eesti Liinirongid) board,  Andrus Ossip. /-/ The survey by Salomets revealed that in Latvia also the railway was  actually fit for trains to go to Riga at 120 kilometers per hour. Unfortunately Eesti Raudtee did not deal with passenger transport and on the issue Elron should be consulted. /-/ «Frankly, Elron is not engaged in this matter,» Ossip replied briefly and matter-of-factly into the Postimees microphone. «We have not sufficient suitable rolling stock.»

Earlier he had told the councillors that the ambition and first priority of Elron is not to go to Riga because if there is not enough rolling stock to ensure quality on Estonian lines it would be unrealistic to start moving towards the Latvian capital.

«I am amazed» Verni Loodmaa of the Estonian Reform Party said, referring to the fact that a speed of 160 km/h in the Tallinn direction and a Riga connection with a change in Valga which is  included in the national development plan from two years ago is gone from the agenda.

So it is then with the ”carrots”. But a question that haunts me since several days is that if once more invite  the railway directors to go by bus to Tartu they might suddenly on the road call their Latvian colleagues and ask if they possibly had a surplus train? Or contact some enterprising Latvian businessman who might send a Latvian train not only from Riga to Valga but to Tallinn via Tartu? That would make a Riga Balsam Express service instead of Rail Baltic. It is to be hoped that the Estonian government will raise the excise tax on alcohol in the near future.

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