The Karelian Trains is organized as a cooperation between the mighty RzD (the Russian state railways) of Russia and VR-Yhtymä (the Finnish state railways) of Finland. RzD has been actively organizing new smaller units separate of its 2 million people works force. Karelian trains is one of these new era units for them.

The two railroad companies have for a moment still a monopoly for running traffic between Finland and Russia, although this monopoly is on rails only. The current situation might change in coming years as this kind of arrangements are seen as braking against the basic rules of European Union and the Union has taken strong steps against the similar arrangement in the air. The airliners form the strongest competition to the Karelian trains as the cost of travel is practically the same and flying only takes 35 minutes compared with the 3,5 hours on train. With the competition starting in the air we will see if the now successful operations of the Karelian trains need to be revised. Other competing forms of transportation are buses and minibuses, private cars and ferry ships running between St Petersburg and Helsinki.

Karelian trains was initially set up as a normal cooperation but later became a train owner only. The marketing is arranged by both parent companies and the services for the trains are also provided from outside.

For the moment Karelian trains fleet consists of 4 Allegro Pendolinos. For the future of the successful operations we expect they will have more units of the same or similar type.

On the upper picture Ali Huttunen the CEO of Karelian trains and Vice president Akulov of the RzD are posing next to the brand new Allegro unit 01 still in test drives.

On the lower picture the Allegro unit zooms past Kerava, Finland in the winter morning.

Both pictures by Stanislav Voronin.

On one cold February morning the first unit of the Allegro Pendolino train sets neared Helsinki Vuosaari harbor on the open decks of the ship. The ship had started its journey weeks before from Italy, where the Savigliano built Pendolino had been loaded onto it. Normally at this time of the year there would had been heavy ice build up on the ship and its cargo on the ice covered Finnish gulf of the Baltic sea, but miraculously and to the relief of the crews this had been avoided this now. Also no storms this time, on similar voyage years ago on English channel one of the VR-Yhtyma Pendolinos was severely damaged and needed to be shipped back to its manufacturer for repairs.

A large harbor portable crane carefully lifted one by one all of the 7 Pendolino modules to the waiting heavy duty trucks on the pier.


Stas as a reporter was alert and at the harbor during the first offloading of the Pendolino units. As a result we now have these marvellous pictures published here. Look at especially the components under the first car hanging on the crane, and you can also click the picture to see the XL version of it - this should show even the smaller details of the cardan axle and other parts.

The first train travelled on trucks to Pasila depot, where it was craned to the tracks for connecting between the ready built modules. Some of the following units were already put to track at the harbor. Why carry a train 20 kilometers on highway if it can be offloaded to tracks where it is lowered from the ship?

All pictures by Stanislav Voronin.

The trains wen't through a very substantial testing program to root away any possible defects in the trains technical systems.

All pictures by Stanislav Voronin.