Last week, RB Rail AS, the Baltic joint venture and lead implementer of the Rail Baltica project, organized ten online meetings with the potential suppliers of cable ducts, channels, manholes, and related items.
Overall, companies from the Baltic States, Denmark, Italy, and other locations took part in the meetings. The main objective of the meeting was to update the suppliers on Rail Baltica’s progress and inform them of the consolidated procurement approach for the selected elements for the Rail Baltica Global Project. In addition, suppliers shared with the project implementers their production capacities, product range, lead times, preferred contractual aspects, and more.
During the meetings, RB Rail AS team could get acquainted with different technologies, assess the market practice in supplying the goods as well as share ideas about Rail Baltica technical specifications for the components.
Throughout the year, RB Rail AS has conducted consultations with the suppliers of railway materials and components, such as rails, sleepers, ballast, turnouts, concrete elements.
Rail Baltica will require quantities of various railway infrastructure components and materials on an unprecedented scale for modern Baltics. This presents an opportunity to develop a system of consolidated procurement, enabling Rail Baltica to not only achieve favorable pricing and delivery conditions but also ensure consistent quality, full interoperability, and major life-cycle benefits towards the future performance and maintenance of Rail Baltica.
The Rail Baltica team will use the valuable feedback from the industry to further refine the upcoming technical specifications for individual components and component groups, as well as to elaborate on a detailed procurement strategy. We currently expect the first tenders to be announced in the fourth quarter of this year, aiming to sign the first framework agreements by mid-2021.