Posted by 1659447091 3 days ago
Now, I don't really mind this, it's a bit of a tradition if you want, but I asked a relative of mine who used to work for the Italian national train company, and he told me that this train works like this cause in the past all the Sicilian migrants would travel with a lot of luggage, and it would be very impractical for them to transfer all of that twice. Nowadays this is not really the case anymore.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854834
What makes it particularly ambitious? The strait of Messina is two miles across, and I don't think that even cracks the top 100 of the world's longest bridges.
The current longest is in Turkey at 2023 meter.
Each of the pylons of the Messina Bridge will be around 400 meters tall. Which is taller than the Empire State Building.
The strait is too deep, with too much current and seismic activity to place the pylons in the water. So they have to be on the shore, as I understand it.
The strong presence of organized crime in the area also makes a lot of people uneasy about the whole deal, but that's not a technical issue.
> "...building a suspension bridge of this scale poses significant engineering challenges. The Strait of Messina is known for strong winds, seismic activity, and deep waters, all of which complicate construction and long-term stability. Engineers will need to ensure the structure can withstand earthquakes, which aren't unheard of in the region, while addressing corrosion from the salty marine environment."
-- https://www.iflscience.com/worlds-longest-suspension-bridge-...
I remember reading an article, posted here on HN, that went into much more depth about why this was all unusually challenging, but I haven't found it again.
I went on the train between Hamburg and Copenhagen around 2007. Crossed on a ferry between Puttgarden (Germany) and Rødby (Denmark). Looks like this was discontinued in 2019 but I'm not sure what replaces the Hamburg-Copenhagen link. I'm glad I did it, it was definitely a strange experience to disembark the train on to a ferry and go and stand on the deck as it crossed.
The Helsingborg-Helsingør train ferry was replaced (car ferries remain) by railway on the Öresund Bridge (from the 2011 TV series The Bridge) between the big cities Malmö, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark in 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge
The Puttgarden-Rødby train ferry was replaced by a new longer but faster railway route via the Great Belt Bridge and Flensburg until the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link is ready. https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/hamburg-to-copenhag...
https://en.japantravel.com/aomori/memorial-ship-hakkoda-maru...
I have taken this train and it would have been a nightmare to wake up everyone at like 3am, get them and all their stuff out and onto the ferry, and then do it all in reverse on the other side. It would add at least an hour to the trip if not more.
Don't those already exist? I don't know, but I assume that regular passenger ferries operate on this route, no?
> it would have been a nightmare to wake up everyone at like 3am
I presume that if one were offloading passengers onto an existing ferry one would not schedule the train to arrive during normal ferry operating hours rather than 3AM.
I think the right answer here is that Sicily is bigger than I thought, about 100 miles across, and so the onward travel time can be significant, and so if you're going to offer a night train whose final destination is (say) Marsala then putting the train on a ferry in the middle of the night makes sense.
No one will ask you for a ticket (no one will ask for anything, actually). Or at the least it was like this some twenty years ago when I did it.
This is also a great way to randomly arrive in Siracusa wondering how did you end up there, in some sort of re-enactment of the last Indiana Jones movie.
Only these italians had the genius idea to keep going with the train.
I think it's more about the state of the infrastructure, and the scope of the railway carrier, at least in this case with Sicily.
For example the railway ferries between Sweden and Denmark ended long before the bridge was built, in the 80s.