The company has issued a tender for a respective strategic environmental impact assessment (SEIA). The winner would have until mid-November 2013 to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the two routes, according to the tender documentation.
The winner of the tender should be selected by around mid-June and the exact route should be established in November 2013, Vidmantas Gudas, Lietuvos Geležinkeliai spokesman, told BNS. He could not specify when the first tenders for the construction of the segment between Kaunas and Latvia’s borders could be issued.
The total length of Rail Baltica in Lithuania is 335 kilometers and the total estimated value is about 1.9 billion litas (EUR 550m), including around 850 million litas for a segment from the Polish border to Kaunas.
Lithuania's railways were built to the Russian gauge of 1,520 millimeters, whereas the European gauge is narrower, of 1,435 millimeters.
The Rail Baltica European-gauge railway is a strategic Baltic transport project aimed at linking Poland to Finland via the three Baltic countries.
