A new organisational unit of the PKP PLK company – the Centre of High-Speed Railway (Centrum Kolei Dużych Prędkości) – started to operate in July. Its main task will be managing the project of the high-speed railway construction in Poland. This shows that the high-speed railway programme is moving forward.

‘The decision to establish the unit was taken by the company’s supervisory board,’ explains Jan Raczyński, director of the Centre and the former director of the Bureau of High-Speed Lines. ‘The Centre took over the tasks of the previous bureau. Our work will cover the entire high-speed railway project, not only the Y line from Warsaw via Łódź to Poznań and Wrocław.’

The establishment of the Centre of High-Speed Railway means that the investment is entering another stage of preparations. The Centre is financially autonomous. It comprises seven project teams that work out guidelines for the different aspects of the investment. The project is viewed as an increasingly promising prospect, which is confirmed by the fact that PKP PLK S.A. commissioned the Railway Scientific and Technical Center to prepare a project of the development programme for the high-speed railway in Poland by the year 2040. In the following few months, the proposed programme will be comrehensively discussed with experts.

The High-Speed Railway project first plans to build the Y line connecting Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań and Wrocław, and to modernise the Central Railway Main Line (CMK) from Warsaw to the Upper Silesia, with a branch leading to Kraków. The Y line is to be constructed by 2020. It will include a tunnel under the centre of Łódź. According to the plan, first, the Łódź Fabryczna station will be hidden underground, and the overground area will be taken by the New Centre of Łódź – Kobro City. In the past months, the contractors for the feasibility studies of the Y line and the tunnel under Łódź were selected – these are the Ingenieria IDOM Internacional consortium and the SENER consortium, respectively.

High-speed rail will reduce the journey between Poland’s major conurbations to under 2 hours, the journey from central Poland to the borderland to ca. 3 hours, the journey from western to eastern Poland and from the northern regions to the southern regions to 5-6 hours. As many as 80 per cent of Polish people will be able to access their nearest station on the high-speed railway line in less than an hour.

Under the grassroots initiative ‘Szybka Kolej Tak!’ (High-Speed Rail Yes), Jacek Prześluga from PKP SA argued for a special purpose vehicle (a limited joint-stock partnership) which shall not be a part of the Polish Railways (PKP) structures and which shall take on the task of advancing the fast railway construction project. The partnership would operate until the project starts and could then be closed down or, should this be the decision of the authorities, could manage and operate the high-speed railway line. The PL2012 state company which coordinates the preparations for the European Football Championships in 2012 serves as a model. ‘It is still too early to think about setting up such a company, but once the project is very advanced, it can be done,’ says Jan Raczyński.