As European Coordinator of the North Sea-Baltic Corridor, I closely follow the Rail Baltica project implementation. I am pleased to see that milestone progress has been achieved over the recent months – starting with the agreement on the contracting scheme that defines the procurement procedures for the project, the recruitment of staff at the central coordination body “RB Rail AS”, and now the signature by the Prime Ministers of the Baltic States of the Intergovernmental Agreement to be ratified by the national Parliaments. This reaffirms the strong will of the Baltic States to be better connected to each other and to their neighbours, by a fast and environmentally friendly means of transport. The Rail Baltica is a project of European interest by its very nature, and it will bring socio-economic benefits to the whole region by creating new opportunities for growth.
With the decisions on the detailed alignment of the railway, and ongoing preparations to start construction activities next year, the project is finally approaching a level of maturity that allows us to speak no longer of a planned railway connection, but one which is being realised. In order to give it every chance of success, the key parties to the project shall not cease to move forward in a cooperative spirit, catching up with the delays caused by some difficult discussions in the past. We need to demonstrate to the Members of the European Parliament and to the Council of Ministers that the project is moving forward steadily and will require substantial support under the next EU financial framework.
This is the message that I am passing to the members of the Supervisory Board of “RB Rail AS” today, and I am looking forward to offering my support also to the new Ministers for Transport of Estonia and Lithuania when I will meet them in a couple of weeks, as well as continuing my exchanges with their Latvian counterpart. I am also looking forward to further facilitating the cooperation with Finland and Poland, which both take a key interest in the project’s development. Our common objective for this year shall be to reach the point where the project becomes irreversible. We are almost there.
January 2017
By Ms Catherine Trautmann