Sweden will cut the top speed for trains on dozens of railway lines because an ageing network has made fast travel unsafe, the country's rail operator said Monday. Maintenance authority Trafikverket has warned that Swedish rail cables, tracks, signals and bridges on 69 mainlines are so run down that high speed has become risky.
"As soon as we detect a point of erosion we have to cut the speed," said Trafikverket spokesman Bengt Olsson. "As traffic intensifies, so does wear and tear in some places."
The authority in June issued a recommendation to cut the top speed on the fast train between Stockholm and Sweden's second-biggest city Goeteborg - the key rail link in the country - to just 130 kilometres per hour compared with 200 km/h now.
"This means 10 to 20 minutes of additional time for the trip" that currently lasts 3 hours and 20 minutes," Malin Hultgren, spokeswoman for rail operator SJ, told AFP.
Sweden, which is about 2,000 kilometres long and 500 kilometres wide, has a rail network of 12,000 kilometres.
Harsh winter conditions in the Nordic country take a heavy toll on rail infrastructure, ageing equipment faster than in more temperate climes.
The Swedish government last year earmarked more than four billion kronor (400 million euros, $448 million) to bring the rail network back up to speed by 2018.
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