“Rail Baltica” project coordinator JSC “RB Rail” and the national implementers of the project SIA “Eiropas dzelzce līnijas”, “Rail Baltic Estonia” and “LTG Infra” have signed a contract worth 4,543,292 euros with the French company “Certifer” as the only safety assessment service provider (AsBo) for the entire Rail Baltica main route during the design, construction and integration phases during the project implementation, RB Rail representatives said.
The main responsibility of the AsBo, or the assessment body, is to provide the final safety assessment reports in order to meet the minimum requirements of the national safety authorities and to obtain the necessary permits, thus ensuring the commissioning of the Rail Baltica core route.
“The involvement of the assessment body at an early stage of the project is an important step for the safe and reliable operation of Rail Baltica’s infrastructure, electricity, control and signaling subsystems,” explained Mark Philip El Bezs, RB Rail’s technical director and board member.
Certifer is an international railway certification company founded in France in 1997 and specializes in the provision of safety inspection, certification and test services for rail and urban transport worldwide.
Certifer has so far worked on many large-scale European railway projects, such as the Paris-Bordeaux high-speed rail projects in France, Y-Vasca in Spain, High Speed 2 in the United Kingdom, and conventional lines in Denmark and Belgium.
Certifer is expanding its participation in the project to include the role of assessment body in addition to the role of executor of the Notified Body (NoBo), says Pierre Kadziola, CEO of Certifer, stressing that Rail Baltica is the largest infrastructure project in the region in the coming decades.
The AsBo service provider will assess the Rail Baltica project as an external independent and certified body, making sure that Rail Baltica complies with the Common Safety Standards and Risk Assessment (CSM-RA) in accordance with European legislation. Thus, the AsBo assessment body will provide the main guarantee required for the safety of the railway system.
The Rail Baltica project envisages the creation of a European standard gauge railway line from Tallinn to the Lithuanian-Polish border, so that the Baltic States can be further connected to other European countries by rail. In the Baltic States, it is planned to build a new 870-kilometer-long European gauge railway line (1,435 millimeters) with a maximum train speed of 240 kilometers per hour.
It was initially estimated that the cost of Rail Baltica would reach 5.8 billion euros, including the branch decided to be built between Kaunas and Vilnius, and part of these costs will be covered by European Union funds, but as the prices of construction materials increase labor costs, this figure will have to to adjust.
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