Rail Baltica Growth Corridor

Rail Baltica Growth Corridor is an international project whose main goal is to create, promote and publicize a rail link from Germany through Poland and the Baltic States to Finland. The project began on January 1, 2011 and was completed in early June 2013. The RBGC project was co-financed by the European Union from the European Regional Development Fund within the framework of the Baltic Sea Region Program, and its budget for 2011-2013 amounted to nearly €3.6 million.

The Rail Baltica Growth Corridor project was initiated to strengthen the competitiveness of the regions in the eastern part of the Baltic Sea Region by improving their transportation accessibility. In the dissemination of new, hitherto underused corridors for the movement of goods, passengers and capital particularly in the north-south direction, the project sees opportunities for the development of cities, private and public initiatives, and thus the improvement of the population’s living conditions. Under this ambitious challenge, it has succeeded in bringing together a wide range of diverse partners including those from the scientific, economic and political communities, creating an open platform of cooperation for the implementation of public and private initiatives within the Baltic Railway growth corridor.

In pursuit of highly ambitious but complementary and reinforcing challenges, the RBGC project work was divided into work packages (WPs). WP3 and WP4 involved questionnaire and study surveys of potential project stakeholders. In WP4, private sector stakeholders – transportation, shipping, communications companies and logistics centers – were analyzed, while in WP3, public sector institutions – city and regional governments and central government representatives responsible for transportation – were analyzed. The results of these analyses served as the basis for launching two pilot programs – WP5, within the framework of which a pilot communications information system was created, and WP6, aimed at strengthening interoperability and facilitating cooperation between logistics centers operating on the Rail Baltica link. The most important results and directions for future activities are summarized in the Rail Baltica Development Strategy, available for download.

In addition, a study titled: Study of the impact of the implementation of Rail Baltica on the logistics sector in the Mazovian Voivodeship, downloadable, was made from project funds. It is an attempt to identify favorable, potentially indifferent, or even unfavorable effects of Rail Baltica’s implementation on the economic development and entrepreneurship of the Mazovian Voivodeship. The information it contains allows one to look at the Rail Baltica project in the context of the region’s existing transport corridors, the existing logistics infrastructure and the scope of the transport tasks carried out by the two basic transport modes, road and rail, in their combination in the form of intermodal, combined transport.

More information about the stages of the RBGC project, as well as a database of articles and project materials, can be found at www.rbgc.eu.