Can anyone help me with Import through Tornio on Finnish railway during the winter war ?
I tries to get the a picture on Swedish deliveries and transits during the winter war and then Haparanda and Tornio railway stations became one of the major bottlenecks of Finnish imports during the war.
Any Sources or other input?
if possible not in Finnish, (But Google translate has learned a lot during the last ten years, now it might even be readable)
One of my primary sources on the rail situation are from the Scandinavian conference of "Interscandinavian transit in case of crisis or blockade" that where held during during 1938-1939, in Carl von Horns personal archive, He was one of the Swedish participants and a captain at Swedish GHQ Transport Department (Kommunikationsavdelningen), specalized on rail transport.
The Finnish members where H. Andersson FÅA, Max Frenzell Engineer and Director at VR, and ÖvLt O. Blom
The general idea was that Finland's import had to be by sea, the rail could only cope with 10% of the demand.
A Finnish report estimated that Tornio Railway station could transload 120 wagons a day with three shifts with 80 men each at the normal platform and a similar number on the east side of the magazines with help of lorries.
But they then go on to say that given the threat of air raids, it would be prudent to estimate the total capacity to 40 wagons per day in each direction.
No demands where made on Sweden to upgrade the Haparanda side, rather that Finland could supply 40 tankwagons on normal gauge in Norway and Sweden to assist imports to Finland. (five where actualy used Narvik -Haparanda during the winter war)
The Norwegians on the other hand was rather pessimistic what they could contribute with more than the harbors and rail lines.
Rolling stock, personnel and even coal had to be provided by the Swedes and only wagons with compressed air braking should be used in Norway.
While the Norwegian wagons on Swedish tracks would be old manual brake system.
There are references to an earlier agreement between Sweden and Norway and it looks like they tried to set up positions in a negotiation rather than trying to support each other in case of emergency.
Norwegians also demanded that the turntable i Storlien(border between Trondheim and Östersund) had to be replaced as it was too small for the longest Norwegian steam engines with snowplow attached.
Three weeks before the winter war broke out the new turntable where in operation, so these talks resulted in some actual improvements however small.
Where there any Finnish preparations in Tornio during 1938-39 ?
Today the railway area seems to been a development area so I found some documents online with detailed maps of the station area.
http://212.50.147.149/kaavatornio/tiedo ... alue_p.pdf
and
http://212.50.147.149/kaavatornio/tiedo ... 310316.pdf
In the first document, the map on page 15 does it shows the area before 1928?
Is there anything said about what was Swedish tracks and what was Finnish tracks,
on the bridge cross Torneälv both are placed on the same embarkment, but I assume they where switched into two different embarkments on the Finnish side as done on the Swedish side.
There are three works by Masi Montonen online, the one dealing a bit with Winter war in hte link below.
but I can't find any references to import and exports, most is prewar planning and then the situation in South east:
RAUTATIEKULJETUSTEN TOIMEENPANOSUUNNITELMAT ENNEN TALVISOTAA
https://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/1 ... sequence=2
In Haparanda, the broad gauge tracks are north of the station buiding:
(I have to right click and select open picture in new tab to get the high resolution version)
In Swedish I found the following text obvioulsy written for some sort of history about Swedish rail during ww2.
http://www.jvmv2.se/forum/index.php?id=211171
Appreciate any help
/John
