A Nice Station for a Change - Monaco.

Taking a Break from Cold Winter Weather to Visit the Medditerranean.

I’ve been writing a lot about Toronto over the past few months — can you blame me? We make so many poor decisions in this part of the world, and we spend so much for entirely mediocre projects by international standards.

This post is already off on a negative note, but I was recently watching F1 with my partner and was reminded that Monaco has quite the train station. I want to show you this station to remind you just what is possible when you have knowledge on how to build and operate railways and infrastructure. Most cities have their major rail stations mostly or entirely above ground, and I still find the idea of a major rail hub being subterranean very intriguing.

Monaco Monte-Carlo By Jorge Láscar from Australia - Gare de Monaco-Monte-Carlo, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=152363802

So often when I visit Europe, I’m not just impressed by the railways themselves, but the supporting infrastructure and complex earthworks which enable these transport projects — North America does have some grand highways, but they are different and often easier. Highways can be steep and accommodate sharp turns — railways by comparison cannot. This means pulling off large-scale railway projects requires a level of planning and coordination we just can’t imagine.

Infrastructure that we sort of have equivalents to in North America is also much more impressive: while most air-rail links in North America see railways terminating next to terminals above ground, in Europe there are through underground rail connections that connect heavy rail services, sometimes even international ones, to flights. You often hear “well, we build highways”, but almost no North American airports (if any) have a substantially tunnelled highway under them. In Europe I wouldn’t be surprised if there are 5 or 10 times more tunnels than all of North America; in fact, I bet some countries like Italy and Switzerland have more by themselves.

So, with that aside — back to Monaco.