The Minister of Transport of the outgoing Latvian government, Tālis Linkaits, announced the day before yesterday at the meeting of European Union Transport Ministers in Brussels, “that any Member State that has a railway network different from the European one, until 2025- 2026 . a transformation plan should be drawn up”. Yesterday, however, the video and audio recording of the “Rail Baltica” Industry Day was available to anyone who was interested, in which the coordinator of the North Sea-Baltic Corridor Katrīna Trautmane justified the change of lane in Latvia with Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The Baltic states and Finland should be more closely linked to Europe “to ensure peace and security in these countries”, as well as “for military reasons”. He used the real difficulties, especially felt in wartime, to maintain rail freight traffic between Ukraine and EU countries as an argument that the European roadway should also be introduced in the Baltic countries.
Russia is painted white like the Arctic
More expressively than his words, namely the position of the current EU leaders was expressed by an accessory – a map projected next to K. Trautmane, where Russia is depicted as a white void. All of Northern and Eastern Europe has reentered from Russia and Belarus, leaving only Southern Europe as a kind of tongue that comes across a 1520 mm gauge space to a single point of contact, where the exchange of goods transported on rail between Europe and Asia could take place. Latvia and other European countries will no longer participate in all this: “Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transport links of the Northern Dimension with Russia and Belarus are canceled”, it was already said in the text released by T.Linkaita.
Indeed, it is justified to imagine Russia as a blank page, but not in the sense that from now on it will be empty and white, inhabited only by polar bears. Russia as a blank page means not knowing which political map will be drawn on this page in the near future. Depending on the future of Russia and Belarus, who have joined it, as a result of the change of their current borders and political regimes, it will become clear what kind of economic relations, including trade, will become possible between the various territories among which the current EU leaders have drawn a seemingly impassable border. It can neither be guaranteed nor excluded now that the Latvian railways and ports will create a transit corridor that will compete very successfully with the Free City of St. Petersburg for the transportation of cargoes of Kemerov Kaganate coal to Europe, etc. in the world. Moreover, such a drastic division of Russia is not mandatory at all, so that there are many people interested in sending and receiving goods through Latvia, the Baltic states or Finland to the territory of present-day Russia. It would be completely absurd to rule out this possibility already, if only by trying to move the east-west tracks from 1520 mm to 1435 mm apart. In reality, this would be an extraordinarily expensive way to tear down this rail.
Not economics and not politics, but pure ideology
The signals coming from Brussels can be treated as pure ideology, which is not yet even political. This is driven by the distant deadlines for the current conditions, after which it will not be necessary to start redoing the tracks, only to report plans to start with these tracks in the future. We hope these plans are dictated by real life, which no EU institution will be able to resist.
Changing the roadway means costs that can be described as fantastic on the scale of Latvia. Former deputy chairman of “Latvijas dželzce” (LDz), currently in office as president, Aivars Strakšas (pictured), told The Independent that such costs would amount to 10 billion euros in current value. For comparison, it should be remembered that the official cost assessment of “Rail Baltica”, which probably lags behind the real costs, currently corresponds to 5.8 billion in total, therefore not only in the Latvian section. The EU has been looking for these billions for at least ten years, until the talk of “Rail Baltica” was empty talk. Even now, the nominally required billions of “Rail Baltica” have not yet been fully recorded in the EU expenditure items and exist only as an argument that the EU will not allow the construction work that has already begun to be suspended.
A. Strakšas explains the high costs by the fact that it will be necessary to change not only the distance between the tracks, which would be the cheapest operation in the entire railway reconstruction. The communication and security systems, which have remained in Latvia since the Soviet era, will also have to be changed. Latvia has so far managed to recover from their replacement with the caveat that these systems are constrained to a distance of 1520mm between rails. If this shortcoming disappears, the justification for not adopting all the other European railway standards also disappears. But these rules have established that the railways throughout Europe operate at a loss and are actually state-funded institutions.
Will the war budget be able to pay for everything?
The talk of changing the width of the railway as a possibility is already enough to make it difficult to maintain the tracks of the current width, which LDz can no longer afford with its revenues. It so happened that just yesterday the Council of Ministers decided to allocate 6.503 million euros to this company “to guarantee financial equilibrium for the reference period of 2020”. Indeed, LDz would have already gone bankrupt without state support with ten times as much sums.
Without cargo from Russia, the maintenance of “Rail Baltica” will become even more problematic. As is known, it also includes an area for cargo transfer between tracks of different widths on the territory of Latvia. If there will be no Russian-gauge tracks in Latvia, then such a transshipment will not be needed, because there will be no cargo, which is also included in the cargo of “Rail Baltica”, that is, in the revenue section. From what K. Trautmanes said, one could conclude that the maintenance of “Rail Baltica” will mostly be transferred to the military budgets of the countries, but this is not an answer to the question of where the money comes from in these budgets.
