Environment, safety at work and good practices in large-scale multimodal infrastructure project implementation and railway operations – these are the topics at the heart of the partnership signed today, on 29 June, between the promoters of the Lyon-Turin line and the Rail Baltica joint venture RB Rail AS at the Connecting Europe Days.
The Connecting Europe Days – the European Commission’s event that for ten years has brought together representatives of the institutions, of the economy and transport sector to discuss the present and the future of the TEN-T networks in the context of the Green Deal goals – provided an opportunity for the two major projects at the heart of the Mediterranean Corridor and the North Sea-Baltic Corridor to meet.
“Today we are addressing the challenge of building the longest railway tunnel in Europe,” said TELT’s Deputy Director General, Lione Gros. “But in a few years, we will have another mission: to operate the line in one of the fundamental axes of the economic, social and cultural development in the continent. This is the common denominator with Rail Baltica. Our partnership aims at finding good practices and solutions that generate high added value. And even though the link between Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia is very different (from an engineering point of view) from the one between Lyon and Turin, it is part of the same European logic of sustainable growth”.
Rail Baltica is a high-speed railway infrastructure megaproject in the three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), aiming to bridge the missing link between Finland in North and Poland in South. Rail Baltica will ensure a new economic corridor, post-Covid recovery and military mobility.
“Considering the truly cross-border nature of this project, international reach, new cooperations and best-practice sharing is of a great importance. Today we are cooperating with more than 200 Baltic and 50 global companies, and we are happy to extend and strengthen our partner’s network,” said Agnis Driksna, Chairperson of the Management Board and CEO at RB Rail AS.
These values of collaboration and cooperation were recalled by the European Commissioner for Transport Adina Vălean at the opening ceremony of the event, which takes place at the end of the semester of the French Presidency of the EU, in Lyon. The Commissioner emphasized the importance of the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region capital in the TENT-T network and the great opportunity that the new tunnel under the Alps represents for increasing the modal shift from road to rail.