RZD Invites to Investors for New High Speed Railway Projects

Russian Railways has invited foreign investors to bid for a 30-year contract to design, build, finance and maintain new high-speed rail links in Russia.

It has created a subsidiary company, High-Speed Rail Lines, to handle the project, which will present potential bidders with its strategy for developing the project in March 2011, and will present an international tender for the Moscow-St Petersburg route in December.
Various high-speed lines, worth about $68bn, are planned to be built from Samara to St Petersburg for the 2018 World Cup under a concession system for the next three decades.
The 660km line will run high-speed trains with a speed of 400kp/h, which will reduce the journey time between Samara and St Petersburg to two and a half hours from four and half hours.
The Moscow-St Petersburg line is expected to cost about €15bn ($20.4bn), while preliminary maps by Russian Railways show the new line running through Tver, Novogorod and Leningrad, although the final route is yet to be finalised.
A 3,000km line towards the Urals will link Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara and Yekaterinburg, while long-term plans are to build high-speed lines to Kiev and Minsk, and to capitals throughout the former Soviet Union and Europe.
Construction is expected to start in 2013, and the successful bidder should complete the 660km line by 2017, a year before the World Cup in Russia.
The state will bear 70% of the construction costs with the rest from outside investors, most likely from international financial institutions including the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with Sberbank, VTB and VEB expected to join.