The baltic’s largest infrastructure project in about a century has officially started. Multiple portions of the Rail Baltica high-speed rail line is under construction.

The proposed Rail Baltica passenger trains are designed for top speeds of 234 km/h and will provide seamless connections to the rest of the EU. When completed, the 870km rail line will run between Warsaw in the south to Tallinn in the north.

The purpose of the project is to link the capitals of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to the rest of Europe by way of Warsaw, the Polish capital.

The currently used rail systems were built using Russian-standard gauge because they were built by the Soviet Union. Although the countries gained independence decades ago, their railways have not been reconfigured. This means they’re reliant on Russia for much of their goods transported by rail.

The use of Russian-standard gauge has also limited trade by rail with Europe because passengers and cargo need to be offloaded and then reloaded onto different trains at the Polish border.

Discussions of an inter-baltic railway scheme has been discussed since the 1990s, but there’s been a renewed urgency since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The cost burden is being significantly alleviated by the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility(CEF), which has committed to funding 85% of the project.

The overall estimated cost of the huge infrastructure project is €5.8 billion (US$5.8 billion). However, cost-benefits analysis shows that the project could yield up to €16.2 billion (US$16.2 billion) in quantifiable benefits.

in addition to the project’s potential future yield, the construction alone is estimated to create 36,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Once finished, the Rail Baltica connection will represent the newest branch of the EU’s North Sea-Baltic Corridor, a key European route that connects the cities of Rotterdam, Berlin, and Warsaw. The completion of the project is projected for 2026.