At the beginning of the year, Bulgaria and Greece have announced their intention of connecting by rail the ports of Kavala and Alexandropoulos to the Aegean Sea to the ports of Burgas and Varna to the Black Sea. The network will also include the port of Ruse on the Danube River.
The implementation of this project will be announced soon and the exact date of the project initiation will be notified by the Greek Embassy in Sofia.
The project, called Sea2Sea, is a common proposal launched by Greece and Bulgaria that will be carried out with the support of European funds. By initiating this project, the two countries plan to create a multimodal corridor for the transport of freight to serve the Aegean Sea, the Black Sea and the Danube River, which is in fact the pan-European Corridor VII, part of the TEN-T transport network.
The idea of this project has been advanced by experts of the Bulgarian Railway Infrastructure Company (NRIC) and Greek port authorities from Kavala and Alexandropoulos. The project enjoys the support of the Greek Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, as well as the support of the Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and Communications from Bulgaria.
It is estimated that the new railway corridor will substantially improve the connectivity of important intermodal hubs located in North-East Europe, in the Black Sea region and in the Mediterranean Sea region.
Also, the railway corridor between the two countries will provide further development to the ports of Alexandropoulos, Burgas, Varna, Ruse, and Kavala as logistics platforms and will equally contribute to the economic recovery of South-East Europe, a region still affected by the consequences of the on-going financial crisis.
Moreover, it is foreseen that this new railway connection would provide an alternative route for cargo transport to the already congested route through the Bosporus Strait. The total cost of the feasibility study was of EUR 1.5 Million, of which the European Union contributed with EUR 750,000.
Most proposals for the modernization of the freight transport systems, analysed within the Sea2Sea project, have direct effect over the pan-European transport network and need major investments which cannot be justified in the terms of a cost-benefit analysis only by means of the freight transport flows estimated by the Sea2Sea project. For this reason, a limited number of projects have been selected and proposed for the current investment plan of the Sea2Sea corridor (phase 1), while the rest of the projects necessary have been proposed to be implemented in the phases 2 to 4.
Consequently, relative estimates embody massive freight flows between Alexandropoulos (Greece) and Plovdiv (Bulgaria). Based on these aspects, in phase 1 access will fall on this section, which is actually the nucleus of the Sea2Sea corridor.
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