High-speed rail Riga-Jēkabplis

In December 2010 Latvian Transport Minister Uldis Augulis came with a sensational proposal about High-speed rail (HSR) connecting Riga and Moscow. Instead of listing all reasons why Riga-Moscow HSR in unreasonable, I developed a new proposal – Latgale HSR stretching from Riga to Jēkabpils. French LGV Est has demonstrated that HSR can work not only with multi-million cities at booth ends but also as a trunk line with several branches to smaller cities all around the region - similar to the situation in Latgale. The primary use of Latgale HSR would be providing passenger transport from Riga to Jēkabpils and further east on three branches – to Daugavpils Rēzekne and Madona. And the secondary use – an additional freight capacity to Riga port. Though ‘classic’ HSR are passenger-only, several HSR in Germany and at least one in France have/will have mix of freight and passenger trains.

  

Where is the problem?

The existing railway between Riga and Jēkabpils was finished in 1861, since then dozen of towns and villages have emerged near the stops. It is the busiest railway in Latvia carrying big number of freight, suburban and bit smaller number of regional and intercity trains. If traffic will continue to grow, it will become very difficult to sustain so big variety of services on one railway so a need for alternative tracks may emerge. Furthermore – in favor to road transport, the construction of highway replacing the old and inconvenient road trough the towns and villages has already started. If no significant improvement is done to increase the intercity services on the railway, road traffic may steel significant part of passengers.

How this HSR to improve situation?

If a new rail line is considered, it must be build according to modern standards – e.g. the high speed no less then 300km/h. This would allow removing the slot-hungry intercity express service from the old railway. As passenger transport alone could not justify construction of new railway, it must be used also for freight traffic – especially the one heading to docks on the left bank of Daugava in Riga (supposed to be built soon) thus avoiding crossing of the busy Railway Bridge in Riga. The HSR should be routed south of river Daugava because the area is sparsely populated, flat and have vast state forest properties. The whole length of the new railway is approximately 130km; on average speed of 230km/h travel time would drop to 40minutes from Riga Central to Jēkabpils South so cutting the travel time to Daugavpils, Jēkabpils and Rēzekne by more then 1 hour.

A capacity increase by doubling the last single track sections is underway on the old railway so the slot problem will be solved at least for 20 years. But if politicians truly want to make passenger trains the mayor transportation mode in the state, the frequencies and operational speeds for intercity trains should be increased and that also leads to considerably smaller overall capacity of the railway. Latgale HSR is not a project desperately needed right now, but it should be carefully considered by planners. Riga to Daugavpils and Riga to Rēzekne are two of most developed intercity train routes in Latvia and market for passenger transport is bigger than for Rail Baltica or Riga-Moscow HSR project, meanwhile the 130km stretch require far less investments then the other two proposals.