News

Sweco Lietuva has two roles in the Rail Baltica project: it is part of the consortium that is responsible for the infrastructure development plan and the environmental assessment of the Vilnius-Kaunas section of the track, and its labs provide soil testing services for the geotechnical investigation.

The state of emergency caused by the spread of COVID has forced significant changes to our personal and professional lives. The long-term consequences of these changes are still hard to assess but already now many of us are thinking “how will we recover once the state of emergency is lifted?” As the Baltic region’s Project of the Century, Rail Baltica has to play a key role in both helping the Baltic economies weather the current storm, but also in providing a sustained investment stimulus towards medium and longer term economic and social recovery.  

Rail Baltic Estonia announced a call for tenders for the design of Muuga multimodal freight terminal. Muuga terminal will be Rail Baltica’s largest and only cargo terminal connected to the harbour.

As Rail Baltica Global Project is gradually entering the construction phase, the Lithuanian National Implementing Body – Lithuanian Railways Infrastructure (LGI), has announced the prior supplier market consultations with construction companies for the planned main line Rail Baltica construction activities for the section from Kaunas to the LT/LV state border.

RB Rail AS has launched a centralized procurement for several contracting authorities to select a pool of companies to be called on-demand basis and provide independent professional expert services for the Rail Baltica Global Project. 

Today the Rail Baltica Online Forum gathered 1000 online viewers from 39 countries, which included suppliers, industry professionals and other parties interested to learn more about the Rail Baltica project progress and plans for 2020. During the livestream, RB Rail AS representatives introduced the main upcoming tenders, project timeline and strategic direction for the construction procurement as well as long-term development activities.

This week RB Rail AS, the Baltic joint venture and lead implementer of the Rail Baltica project, concluded series of online meetings with the potential suppliers of rail infrastructure components. The direct engagement with the rail supply industry follows after the Rail Baltica component sourcing strategy, which was completed in the end of 2019 in collaboration with TUV Sud and University of Graz. The objectives of the meetings, among other, was to learn in detail the product availability on the market and relevant technical characteristics, and to assess available capacities and lead times as well as to collect supplier expectations towards planned component procurement.

The joint venture of the Baltic States, RB Rail AS has launched a tender to select an engineering service provider for the Rail Baltica energy subsystem development, procurement and deployment supervision. Provision of the energy subsystem engineering services is a long-term partnership, which will cover the period until the beginning of train operation on Rail Baltica corridor.

The joint venture of the Rail Baltica project RB Rail AS, on behalf of the Ministry of Transport of Latvia, has concluded two contracts for the design and design supervision services for the remaining two sections of the Rail Baltica main line Latvia. Both winners were selected based on the most economically advantageous proposal and proposed price is within the planned budget for these key activities.

RB Rail AS has completed the procurement of the detailed technical design and design supervision services for the main line of Rail Baltica in Estonia. Three design and design supervision tenders cover 212 km of the Rail Baltica railway main line in Estonia and include, in accordance with the preliminary design, 15 railway bridges, 40 road viaducts, 24 railway viaducts and 24 animal passages.

Considering the declared state of emergency in Europe and to prevent the spread of the virus COVID-19, RB Rail AS employees in all three Baltic States currently are mostly working remotely with limited access to the office premises.

The Rail Baltica Global Forum organisers are carefully monitoring the public health situation in Europe and, considering the progressive spread of COVID-19, have decided to conduct the event online on 23 April. The in-person event will be carried out in October 2020 in Rīga, Latvia. While we will not be able to ensure the entire planned programme online, we will focus on the most essential information, which is necessary for continuous implementation of the project.

European rail industry experts and policy makers met for the Rail Baltica Forum in Brussels on 5 March. The Forum presented an opportunity to reflect on the priorities for the European rail network in light of the EU’s financial perspectives for 2021-2027 and the European Green Deal. Rail Baltica project implementers presented the current project status and maturity as well as its added value for Europe. 

RB Rail AS, the joint venture of Rail Baltica, has begun the implementation of a Planning, Scheduling and Risk reporting software to ensure efficient management of all project activities and resources. The software will not only improve the existing project control practices but also serve as a measure to speed up the implementation of the project.