The Railway International Regional Forum “1520 Strategic partnership: Baltic Region”, took place in Riga (Latvia) on the 17 and 18 of October 2011 and gathered representatives of railway national companies, private passenger and freight operators, equipment manufacturers, as well as representatives of the financial and politic environment. The participants debated topics related to the set-up of new important guidelines for cooperation in the 1520-1435 regions.
The most important aspects on the development of transport and logistics systems in the Baltic Region, including the White Paper on Transport 2011, infrastructure modernisation for boosting the quality of the transport process, creating a single transport legislation aimed at favouring railway business development in the 1520 and 1435 areas and the priorities for the development of East-West and North-South transport corridors, these were the topics discussed during the session dedicated to railway infrastructure.
“The Forum’s discussions will help us overcome some hindrances in the development of transport corridors, such as how to connect the two different gauges using the existing technologies and to build new lines. The railways have always been the strongest mode of transport and has to be developed to b able to reduce road bottlenecks and to give up sea transport, as much as possible, because it is most time-consuming. It is necessary to join our forces because a single country will not succeed”, declared Ugis Magonis, Chairman of Latvian Railways.
“Using new technologies will boost collaboration in the 1520 area. We have to focus on the railway infrastructure modernisation. We are all aware of the reason that brought us together at the Forum. We are united by something significantly bigger than the 1520 gauge, we are a single transport system. Russian Railways have recently proved a constant transport growth in transports and currently 60% of the freight handled by Latvian Railways are coming either from Russia or through Russia. Recently, the Russian Minister of Transport, Igor Levitin, has agreed to sign an agreement on granting investment funds”, pointed out Vladimir Yakunin, President of Russian Railways.
The general opinion of the leaders of the railway companies in Russia and the Baltic Countries (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) was that, at least for now, it is not necessary to invest the existing resources in the development of new railway projects, as they risk becoming an impossible task, from the financial point of view, and an obstacle in project development because of the current challenging economic situation. Consequently, new transport routes should not be drawn without considering the interests of freight operators, shipping houses and railway freight transport beneficiaries.
One of the discussions held at the infrastructure session referred to “the technological and operational compatibility as factor of boosting railway business activities”. Thus, participants discussed about the opportunities for directing efforts to the modernisation of the existing infrastructure and the upgrading of new ones, as well as about increasing speed on railway routes and synchronizing traffic safety and management systems.
“We have implemented 90% of the EU legislation, but we have not yet managed to separate the infrastructure activity from operation. The North-South Corridor, crossing Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, is a priority for us. In Estonia we have to attract more freight traffic on the network because the infrastructure transport capacity is higher than the transport demand. If we receive funds from the European Union or TEN-T funds we will certainly use them to rehabilitate the railways in Estonia because we don’t have enough funds to upgrade them”, pointed out Kaido Simmermann, Chairman of Estonian Railways.
“We have initiated the construction of a double gauge on one of the lines in Lithuania, and the next objective consists in increasing the capacity of railway lines, we have upgraded the network by installing the GSM-R system and in 2012, we will modernise the infrastructure in Klaipeda Port, which will permit us to increase the shipped volumes. For the Rail Baltica project, we will use EUR 200 Million by 2015”, pointed out Stasys Dailydka, President of Lithuanian Railways.
The Baltic Sea Region, located at the junction of commercial routes and activating as European frontier for the 1520 Area, is a high economic potential for partners in “broad-gauge area”. Cooperation between railway infrastructures should be evenly developed by all sides, which makes necessary the harmonisation of legislation in due time, as well as the harmonisation of the railway transport management system.
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