In 2017, the project was estimated to cost €5.8 billion. The figure had risen to €23.8 billion in 2024
The long-running railway mega-project to connect the three Baltic states needs another €5 billion from the next EU budget to finish laying just a single track by 2030, the company’s CEO, Marko Kivila, told Euractiv.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are building the mightily delayed 870-kilometre, electrified European-gauge railway linking Tallinn, Riga, and Kaunas in Lithuania to Poland and the wider European rail network.
But despite being in planning for decades and a key part of the region’s security infrastructure, there’s serious need to raise much more EU funding just to get a single line ready, Kivila, an Estonian executive, said.
Back in 2017, the project was estimated to cost €5.8 billion in total but that figure was revised after a 2024 joint audit raised it to €23.8 billion. After that major rethink, the operating company RB Rail said a single track across the whole route should be finished by 2030 at an estimated cost of €15.3 billion of the total.
