Rail Baltic Train - Finally Leaving the Station?

Esa Nurkka, 10.7.2015
 
The Transport ministers from Finland, Poland, the Baltic States and Commissioner Violeta Bulc signed a Joint Declaration on Rail Baltic on 22nd June in Riga. Although there are some vague compromises and even discrepancies in the declaration, it was enough to guarantee the half a billion euro financing, which will eventually kick off project Rail Baltic. The Connecting Europe Facility Committee made the formal decision to allocate financing for RB Rail in its meeting today.

A full transcription of the 22.6.2015 Joint Declaration with nurkkaresearch comments and analysis can be downloaded here.

The necessity of Rail Baltic
As stated in the Joint Declaration of 22nd June, Rail Baltic is “one of the most strategic missing links to the trans-European transport network”. Europe needs Rail Baltic, and the European Commission wants Rail Baltic.

The isochrone maps below (snipped from emptypipes.org, courtesy of Peter Kerpedjiev) show expected travel times by train from certain cities. It is clear that especially Finland, Estonia and Latvia are smoothly connected to Moscow by rail, while connections to south are practically non-existent. Countries up in the north would benefit greatly from Rail Baltic, while in Lithuania and especially in Poland the improvement would be less dramatic. 

It is not surprising that of the Rail Baltic partner countries, Lithuania and Poland are the ones that suffer from a severe lack of Rail Baltic motivation. In the Joint Declaration of 22nd June there are several paragraphs dedicated to challenges related to Lithuania, while Estonia is mentioned only as a name in the list of Rail Baltic partner countries. Although all the partner countries will benefit from Rail Baltic, the further up north we go, the bigger the motivation.

Although the Lithuanian Railways don't want to admit it, Rail Baltic's north-south transportation would substantially diversify the future risks related to transportation of east-west cargo. Lietuvos geležinkeliai, Latvijas dzelzceļš and Eesti Raudtee all make big business transporting Russian cargo via their Baltic Sea ports, but they can not count on that business ad infinitum. Russia is constantly investing to its ports at the bottom of the Gulf of Finland, and eventually that means bad news for the Baltic transito business.

Do we really need the whole Rail Baltic?
Commissioner Violeta Bulc stated in politico.eu interview in January 2015, that one must not forget the Big Picture: “I am a systemic thinker: if a small part is to be successful, the bigger system also has to be successful.” This is very true with Rail Baltic.

Currently it looks like the northern part of Rail Baltic in Estonia and in Latvia is proceeding nicely, while there are lots of uncertainties related to the Lithuanian and Polish sections. What if we get a top notch Rail Baltic connection in Estonia and Latvia, with an inferior or non-existent north-south  railway in Lithuania or Poland?

Let’s compare Rail Baltic with another cross border connection. The Øresund Link connects Sweden and Denmark with a combination of an 8 km bridge, 4 km of Pebber Island surface passage and a 4 km tunnel. What if the bridge and the Pebber Island had a double track high speed railway (as they do have in real life), but the tunnel section would only have a one track railway with 50 % lower speed limit?

You don’t need Excel to tell that such a curtailed Øresund Link would not work. The same goes with Rail Baltic. Constructing just a part of the Tallinn-Warsaw connection would cripple the connection and totally destroy its viability.

Conclusion
The Rail Baltic train is indeed moving now, and there is no stopping it. It’s just that we do not know when the project will be finished and what will be the cost. The worst case scenario is that the Estonian and Latvian sections will be finished by 2025, while Lithuania and Poland do their best to reallocate the Rail Baltic financing to other purposes.

Hopefully Commissioner Bulc with her black belt in taekwondo and expertise in fire walking can bring some balance to the Rail Baltic negotiation table. The Lithuanian Ministry of Transport with their ruthless negotiation tactics have set the tone in Rail Baltic "cooperation" in recent times, and the other partners have time and again been forced to comply with Mr. Sinkevičius' policies.

Anonymous sources within the European Commission have admitted that there was some extremely harsh criticism against Lithuania during the negotiations in late June. However, the final Joint Declaration as well as Ms. Trautmann’s impressive personal plea for Lithuania were eventually softened and polished.

The same goes also with this comment. The original text was longer and contained more colorful language, but to avoid diplomat crisis, I decided to publish only a censored version.