Peep my shiny new rails!

30 April 2025

Travelling between Chisinau and Bucharest by the so-called Friendship train takes a long time – 13.5 hours to be precise. Amsterdam to Paris, a similar distance to that between Chisinau and Bucharest, takes between three and four hours. Why is that?

First, trains aren't as modern and Moldovan trains run on diesel and not on electrified trains, which makes them slower. But most importantly: Most of the EU uses universal railway gauges of 1,435mm (that's the distance between the two inner rails of a railway track), making crossing borders easy and less time-consuming. 

Formerly Soviet-occupied countries like Ukraine and Moldova, however, have tracks based on the wider so-called Russian gauge, which measures 1,520mm. This 85mm difference may seem negligible, but it causes a whole lot of operational problems.

When you reach the border crossing between an EU and non-EU state, you either need to change trains or your train carriage is literally lifted off the ground and the wheelsets are changed to match the different track gauges. At the Romanian-Moldovan border, this process alone takes about two hours and can get noisy.

To overcome this, Moldova’s railway authorities plan to transition from the Russian gauge to the European one in the next ten years. This is important because Moldova is a key transport corridor for both Romanian and Ukrainian goods.

In light of this, Moldovan and Romanian officials recently agreed to reconstruct an old railway crossing across the Prut river that has not been in use since 1993. Around four km of the railway on Moldova’s side will be built using the European gauge.

Once complete, trains transporting goods will start operating first, and eventually, so will passenger trains. By then, the train journeys will hopefully be at least two hours – the time it takes to change the wheelset – shorter.