In February, Poland announced massive investments in its rail infrastructure. It will spend a total of 180 billion Polish zloty (43,1 billion euros) between 2025 and 2032. What is Poland hoping to achieve with those investments?
The large-scale investments are supposed to improve Polish rail in various areas. The largest share of the investment, nearly 19 billion euros, will go to the National Rail Programme. That programme seeks to fulfill a variety of objectives: rail access to seaports, ERTMS implementation, eliminating bottlenecks, ensuring the provision of needs related to defense, enhancing technical parameters on freight corridors, and passenger-related investments.
The programme includes an identification of priorities, revealing that passenger transportation takes the number one priority. For example, Poland wants to improve the technical condition of the TEN-T network, boost the capacity of rail lines within agglomerations, achieve attractive travel times compared to road traffic and improve rail connections in eastern Poland.
What about rail freight?
In second place follows the implementation of ERTMS and the associated communication system GSM-R and ETCS. In third place we can find more freight-related investments, which include improving the technical condition of rail lines forming freight corridors, enhancing infrastructure at rail border crossings, and ensuring efficient connections with seaports in order to to integrate different transport branches.
In other words, the programme aims to increase the competitiveness of Polish rail carriers in freight transport by addressing bottlenecks and improving access to key economic centers and seaports.
1. National Rail Programme until 2030 (with a perspective until 2032) – 18,98 billion euros
2. Central Communication Port (CPK) – 18,02 billion euros
3. Programme for Supplementing Local and Regional Rail Infrastructure “Kolej+” until 2029 – 3,19 billion euros
4. National Reconstruction Plan – 2,28 billion euros
5. Infrastructure accompanying the nuclear power plant for infrastructure manager PKP PLK – 0,67 billion euros
6. Government programme for the construction or modernisation of railway stops for the years 2021–2025 – 0,07 billion euros
Poland’s largest infrastructure hub
The nearly 19 billion euros for the National Rail Programme is closely followed by the CPK. It is Poland’s largest infrastructure project, which aims to bring together air, road, freight and passenger rail operations in a single hub. In terms of rail, it also primarily focuses on passenger transport, but lighter freight trains (carrying containers and semi-trailers) are also planned to be able to make use of the hub.
Other investments include the Kolej+ programme (3,19 billion euros), which is aimed at regional passenger transportation. The National Reconstruction Plan entails funding for rail in the amount of 2,28 billion euros, coming from a covid pandemic-related development fund. Smaller investments will go to nuclear power plant infrastructure, as well as modernising and building railway stops for the remainder of 2025.