05.09.2014
This week, on 25-26 August, at the Rail Baltic seminar in Tallinn, experts in railway planning and construction and the team preparing Rail Baltic in Estonia exchanged experiences. The main topics were related to the preparation of the preliminary design of the railway, which will start first in South Pärnu County. They also discussed various European practices related to environmental impact assessment.
The Estonian planning and design team meeting was attended by experts from Lithuania, Great Britain and Sweden, who have long-term experience in implementing various large railway projects in Europe. The experts discussed various technical solutions that are also planned to be used on the Rail Baltic railway (embankments, bridges, drainage, etc.).
Mikk Reier, the Estonian technical consultant to the project team, explained that on the one hand, the experience of building a 1435-millimeter-wide railway is new, as the last time large-scale new railway connections were built here was in the 1970s. At the same time, it is a conventional high-speed railway, similar to which has been built in our immediate neighbourhood, in Scandinavia, as well as in the rest of Europe. “That is why we have included international experts in our team who already have experience in completing such projects. The project is new for Estonia primarily because when planning and building the railway, the safety requirements and technical standards applicable to modern high-speed railways must be taken into account,” added Reier.
The working meeting was attended by experts from the companies Reaalprojekt, Hendrikson&Ko and Kelprojektas, which are preparing county plans and conducting preliminary design for the construction of the Rail Baltic railway, and cooperation partners from the international company WSP Sweden, as well as employees of the Technical Supervision Authority and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications involved in the project.
Rail Baltic is an environmentally friendly high-speed railway that connects Estonia to the rest of Europe and neighboring countries Latvia and Lithuania. With the support of European Union funding, preparations for construction are expected to continue in 2017-2018.
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