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"One of the more stupid things our government and parliament did was authorizing just to the border and not making sure that there was a treaty with Germany. " This is quite frequent german practice, the same has happened with the east belgian HS line, which will end up in a few kilometers with heavy speed restriction before mandatory stop in Aachen for all Thalys and ICEs. The same will happen east of Strasbourg when the TGV Est will be running next year: Nothing much is done on the german side, and in any case too late as these international projects obviously have the lowest priority in german planning. This is not really new. Thirty years ago you would travel Paris-Forbach at 120 kmh average speed on your TEE, and only reach less than 80kmh on the way to Frankfurt beyond the german border.   "The biggest, I think, was electrifying at 25 kv AC. Yes, all modern schemes are at that but the Germans, Swiss and Austrians (and Sweden but not, repeat, not Denmark (also 25 kv AC and a tunnel connection to Malmo from Kopenhagen I think) run at 15kv 16 2/3 hz..." Well, 16 2/3 is substantially more expensive, as this frequency is not compatible with the countries' "industry" standard of 50hz (60 in the US). Which implies a completely segregated power and distribution infrastructure, and a huge investment. As well as heavier engines, due among others to heavier transformers. In fact Norway has seriously considered switching from 16 2/3 to 50Hz for their Stavanger line. Don't forget, 16 2/3 was only born out of the lower-frequency requirements of the 1920s' engine technology (direct AC engines), and was not justified any longer when technology moved towards rectifiers (later converters) feeding DC engines (later 3-phase synchronous or asynchronous), which was around 1965. Resitsa.
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