“WARSAW to the 3 BALTIC CAPITAL CITIES: Until a few years ago it was virtually impossible to make this journey, as there were no through services and no proper connections linking the 4 capital cities.”

This “there were no through services” depends on when you’re talking about.

For generations, during pre-Soviet times, and during Soviet times, and – for a short while – in post Soviet times, there were indeed routine rail services linking the 3 Baltic capitals, with some services extended on to Warsaw. Similarly, there were links from Russia and Belarus to the Baltic states, with some of those including through carriages to Warsaw. More than 30 years ago, in early post-Cold War times, after being at a conference [split between Helsinki and Tallinn in fact], I returned west direct from Tallinn using a through Tallinn-Warsaw service which called at Riga and Vilnius during the day, and continued overnight to Warsaw (it included sleeper carriages). [The fun and games at one of the borders during the night – both in terms of the gauge change technicalities, and the bureaucratic arguments I had about whether or not I retrospectively needed a Belarusian transit visa – are a story in themelves, but I won’t waste your time with that now. The main through route from Vilnius to Poland in those days went via a tiny corner of Belarus, and the gauge change took place at the last place in Belarus before the Polish border.)

What happened is that the 3 Baltic states joined the EU in the 1990s, and – for perhaps understandable political reasons – they downgraded their links to the east, to Russia etc. But additionally, the EU seems to have told them that running rail services with public financial support was the old-style communist way of doing things, and the nice capitalist EU would help fund new motorways and so on instead, to replace the north-south rail links too. And before long even the rail connections between the 3 Baltic capitals were abandoned, let alone the onward link to Poland.

So geographically sensible and obvious rail links, that had been in use for a century or more, irrespective of political changes and assorted borders coming and going during those years, were shut down.

And now, people in that part of Europe are making a fuss about setting up links they say have never existed before; but they certainly have!

I hope this is of interest.

Best wishes

Albert Beale