The second community consultations regarding the routing of the railway tunnels underneath Łódź are behind us. The atmosphere surrounding the investment has changed dramatically since the last meeting, because according to the Ministry of Transport, the High Speed Railway project will be postponed until 2030. Without it, the idea of the HSR tunnel underneath Łódź has to be shelved for now, and the conventional railway tunnel becomes uncertain. “The tunnel must be created. Without it, Łódź will remain on the peripheries” the participants appealed.

Even though all the people interested in the project are still trying to come to an agreement with regards to the most pressing issues, such as the construction of a railway station beneath Zachodnia street, the most important question now is the realisation of the tunnel construction plans, since the project seems more and more distant in the light of Sławomir Nowak’s recent statement. “Łódź must be connected to the railway network through a tunnel, otherwise there will be no chance for future development,” argued Krzysztof Ostrzycki, a representative of Sener, the contractor for the feasibility study. He was echoed by Grzegorz Zieliński from the EC1 Łódź – City of Culture institution, who explained that Łódź should, above all, fight for the conventional railway tunnels: - “Today, all the important national railway connections pass us by, because it is impossible to get by rail from one station to the other.   Even if the HSR becomes postponed, the conventional tunnel can still be realised. It will be financed from an entirely different funding as a part of a different project.”

Tuesday’s meeting at the Technical University of Łódź did not provide any additional information. The designers once again presented the proposed route for the tunnels. It is still unknown whether the agglomeration railway station will be created under Zachodnia street. The designers insist that the idea is not viable econoomically. The hope for a consensus lies in the announcement that Łódź’s NGO workers will be invited to participate in workgroups and workshops aimed at solving problem issues. The study report should be available next week.

The study, commissioned by the City of Łódź, PKP, PLK and the EC1 Łódź – City of Culture, is being conducted since March 2010, when a 3,5 million PLN agreement was signed with the contractor - SENER. For 1,5 years the experts have been developing the routes for the two tunnels underneath the Łódź City Centere - one of them for HSR only, the other for long-distance trains and the Łódź agglomeration railway. It is clear that the completion of the investment will require the use of TBM technology, i.e. a large mechanical "mole" which will dig the tunnel. The project will also necessitate the employment of methods used in mining. Three variants were accepted by SENER for the final comparison – one of them is the “zero variant”, which abandons the laying of any underground railway connections in the area of Łódź.  The second involves the construction of the HSR tunnel in the southern variant, and the third one assumes its construction in the northern variant, although it is already known that this option conflicts with the route of the entire "Y" track leading from Warsaw to Poznań and Wrocław. As a result, SENER will present only one investment variant to the commissioning institutions. In this variant, the HSR will run westward from the Łódź Fabryczna station and will come out to the surface behind the Retkinia housing complex. A proposal was raised to lay the conventional railway and agglomeration railway and  in the north-western direction, underneath Manufaktura and the Stare Polesie and Koziny districts. The tracks would be connected to the Kalisz line between the Łódź Kaliska and Żabieniec stations, with a total tunnel length of 8 kilometres.