An ambitious rail project to link the three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with Poland will not be fully completed by a deadline of 2030, an official has said.
The costs of the project, known as Rail Baltica, are running at three times the level originally envisaged. However, that may not be the worst problem. A rail official said that if construction “fails completely”, money sunk into the project by Brussels will have to be returned to the EU.
“We risk losing financing and what has been invested so far – we would have to pay it back,” Kitija Gruškevica, deputy chairperson of RB Rail, the company that oversees the project, was cited by the Baltic News Service (BNS) as telling Latvian commercial television broadcaster TV3.
The construction of the international rail line was initially to have cost €5 billion, but in May this year the costs were recalculated at over €15 billion, causing a political storm in Latvia. The country’s transport ministry this week blamed the previous government, adding that a report on budget overruns prepared in 2022 had been suppressed, according to the BNS news agency.
The Rail Baltica project is also less ambitious than originally planned. Instead of two tracks, only one is now planned. Meanwhile, the stop in Riga will be served by an upgraded branch line to save costs rather than a new line being built through the Latvian capital. On the Lithuanian leg of Rail Baltica, the connection from the city of Kaunas to the capital, Vilnius, was to be upgraded to a high speed connection. But this may be delayed.
The new rail link to Warsaw from Tallinn is intended to right many of the deficiencies in infrastructural planning over the past century that have haunted areas such as the Baltic States. While West-East connections in Europe, particularly in the west of the continent, are fast and efficient, North-South connections have been dismal.
Part of the problem in the Baltic states is that many of the connections built during the Soviet era after World War II linked the countries with cities like St Petersburg or Minsk using a wider rail gauge while no efforts were made to build connections with the rest of Europe. A current interrail map for young people shows passengers have to travel 22 hours and change trains two or three times to travel from Tallinn to Warsaw, including getting off and taking a bus at one point in the journey. A train trip of the same distance (around 900 km) from Warsaw to Hamburg in Germany takes less than eight hours.
The new route, when completed, will allow a journey time of less than seven hours between the Polish and Estonian capitals.
“We risk losing financing and what has been invested so far – we would have to pay it back,” Kitija Gruškevica, deputy chairperson of RB Rail, the company that oversees the project, was cited by the Baltic News Service (BNS) as telling Latvian commercial television broadcaster TV3.
The construction of the international rail line was initially to have cost €5 billion, but in May this year the costs were recalculated at over €15 billion, causing a political storm in Latvia. The country’s transport ministry this week blamed the previous government, adding that a report on budget overruns prepared in 2022 had been suppressed, according to the BNS news agency.
The Rail Baltica project is also less ambitious than originally planned. Instead of two tracks, only one is now planned. Meanwhile, the stop in Riga will be served by an upgraded branch line to save costs rather than a new line being built through the Latvian capital. On the Lithuanian leg of Rail Baltica, the connection from the city of Kaunas to the capital, Vilnius, was to be upgraded to a high speed connection. But this may be delayed.
The new rail link to Warsaw from Tallinn is intended to right many of the deficiencies in infrastructural planning over the past century that have haunted areas such as the Baltic States. While West-East connections in Europe, particularly in the west of the continent, are fast and efficient, North-South connections have been dismal.
Part of the problem in the Baltic states is that many of the connections built during the Soviet era after World War II linked the countries with cities like St Petersburg or Minsk using a wider rail gauge while no efforts were made to build connections with the rest of Europe. A current interrail map for young people shows passengers have to travel 22 hours and change trains two or three times to travel from Tallinn to Warsaw, including getting off and taking a bus at one point in the journey. A train trip of the same distance (around 900 km) from Warsaw to Hamburg in Germany takes less than eight hours.
The new route, when completed, will allow a journey time of less than seven hours between the Polish and Estonian capitals.
Source: TVP World, BNS
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