Poland to double budget of rail investment plan

The Polish government is doubling the size of its investment programme for the railway network to 11 billion zloty (€2.38 billion), which will enable the completion of more than 1,200 kilometres of lines across Poland, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has announced.

Under the scheme, dubbed “Railway Plus” and first introduced in 2018, the government plans to extend the existing network of passenger connections, with a particular focus on linking towns to large cities.

“Poland is not only an archipelago of rich cities,” said Morawiecki at a press conference in the eastern town of Janów Lubelski. “Most Poles live in medium and smaller towns and we also remember about them.”

“Today we have a crisis on our eastern border, we also have a refugee crisis, we have economic problems, but we must also constantly focus on development so that cities, towns, hundreds of such places as Janów Lubelski able to grow normally,” he said.

The prime minister revealed that the funding increase will allow the completion of 34 projects to upgrade existing lines or construct new ones, instead of the previously planned 17. The programme is expected to be completed by 2028.

As envisaged under the original programme, the state will cover 85% of investment costs, with the rest contributed by local authorities. But some provinces, districts and municipalities have withdrawn from the scheme citing the difficulty of finding funds amid the pandemic, reported Dziennik Gazeta Prawna daily last November.

“This is a programme for the rich; we can’t afford more,” an unnamed official in Lubusz province told Gazeta Wyborcza last year. “Local governments are not able to bear such large costs,” added another, Marcin Jabłoński.

However, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna noted that interest in the programme was high. According to PKP PLK, Poland’s state railway infrastructure manager, local authorities had ordered preliminary planning and forecasting studies for 47 projects, worth a total of around 16 billion zloty (€3.45 billion).

PKP PLK did not immediately respond to Notes from Poland’s question about fresh data regarding how many preliminary planning and forecasting studies have been ordered by local governments until now and how many of them have been abandoned.

Since 2015, Poland has upgraded and built more than 800 railway stations, sub-stations, stops, and about 6,000 kilometres of tracks, according to the government.

The total value of all investments currently being carried out on the railway network across Poland amounts to over 40 billion zloty (€8.63 billion), it added.

Last year, the government announced that preparatory work is underway for 1,000 kilometres of railway lines that will be built as part of a major transport hub near Warsaw, whose centrepiece will be a new “mega-airport”.

Main image credit: M.M. Czarnecki/Flickr (under CC BY-NC 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.