The 8th reunion of the Railway Days Summit (2013) – Wider Black Sea Area Railway Summit – has been the place of debates of the main challenges and opportunities that economic operators and investors in the WBSA countries are confronted with for developing business in the railway vertical. On the occasion, based on the presentations held by the over 70 international speakers and of the intervention of the 300 participants, Club Feroviar (the organiser of the summit) elaborates a position paper called “Railway, logistics and sustainable urban development = life quality improvement”.
The increasing role of railway transport in providing global trade, but also in generating the sustainable growth of passenger mobility involves several objectives identified by the organisations which participated in the Summit. The document details the context in which the railway transport activities are carried out and the social and historic fundaments of the WBSA. Turning into account the continuity of centuries of pan-continental trade routes, WBSA joins 28 countries and territories in Central Europe up to Central Asia with common objectives on increasing freight volumes on surface routes.
The document identifies several objectives specific to the railway industry, included in five large categories: interurban railway infrastructure; railway freight & logistics transport; railway passenger transport; urban transport and infrastructure; innovation and the implication of the private sector.
Regarding the railway infrastructure, the authorities seek to improve the soft infrastructure and physical infrastructure through investments in sectors which present bottlenecks and especially on cross-border sections, in the construction and modernisation of the railway rings of the large urban centres, in the cross-border extension, in the electrification of main routes and in the standardisation of the signalling and control systems. Last but not least, the construction of a high-speed network to focus on the large urban and commercial centres will increase the attractiveness of the area for the business community. Infrastructure development has to consider three important challenges of the region: the existence of two main gauges within WBSA (1520 mm and 1435 mm) which creates a fracture area on the borders of the countries where transfer from one system to another takes place; the high administrative-territorial fragmentation of the region which does build barriers for long-distance transit; extremely varied environmental and geographical conditions, from crossing large rivers and mountain areas to plains, and from Arctic temperatures to Mediterranean temperatures.
Regarding investments in the technical infrastructure sector, the projects to be considered are those aimed at creating a sustainable bottleneck-free WBSA railway network. The construction and modernisation of the railway by-passes of the large urban centres will significantly reduce the travel time of long-distance trains and will increase the attractiveness of WBSA as preferred route for the transport of freight between the two ends of the Eurasian platform. The electrification of the large railway routes will increase the energy-efficiency of trains and will reduce the carbon dioxide footprint, as well as traction costs. This policy has to be extended for the terminals as well, so as to allow electric trains to serve the entire network.
Freight transport on such a wide area cannot develop without a technical and administrative common framework that would enable mobility and communication between business communities. Therefore, the development of an infrastructure that would permit business commuting on long distances and with reduced costs has to be considered when building the WBSA rail network.
The construction of a high-speed network to connect the main urban and business centres in the region, next to the speeding up of railway connections to airports which will permit the acceleration of exchanges between regions and the construction of an efficient trade network.
by Ştefan Roşeanu
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