Oresund link is crowning glory as TENs priority projects move towards completion

Date: 21/09/00

By Tim Jones

REMEMBER TENs? Now rebranded TEN-T, Trans European Networks - a web of otherwise singular cross-border transport, energy and telecommunications projects - once dominated EU summit headlines and sparked clashes between the European Commission and prudent finance ministers.

Those days are long gone. When the showpiece Oresund fixed rail-road link between Copenhagen and Malmö was officially opened in July, press reaction outside the Nordic region was muted to say the least.

Yet this extraordinary feat of engineering and cunning financing - 1 billion euro of which came straight from EU coffers - was completed almost on time, almost within budget and could have been designed by Jacques Delors himself as the archetypal TEN.

Seven years after the former Commission president fought for extra TENs investment at the Brussels summit and four years since his successor used the Florence gathering for the same futile purpose, many of the top 14 projects are close to completion.

Apart from Oresund, two are within four years of fulfilment and all are under construction. Virtually all will be built by 2005. The 2-billion euro Commission-controlled budget is the tip of the iceberg - between 1995 and 1999, the European Investment Bank approved loans worth 28 billion euro for the exhibition transport TENs alone.

Of the 14 priority projects - five high-speed rail links; a dedicated freight line between Rotterdam and the Ruhr; Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, British, Irish and Belgian highways; the Oresund link; Milan's controversial Malpensa Airport; a rebuilt Cork-Dublin-Belfast rail line; and new track from London to Manchester - those behind schedule have tended to be the high-speed rail links.

This is hardly surprising. TGV funding has always been a headache for rail infrastructure builders and, with billions of euro of public money at stake, governments always end up squabbling over where to run the tracks and which regions to benefit most.

It has been hard for infrastructure builder Réseau Ferré de France to get started on the TGV Est project from eastern France into southern Germany, partly because Paris could not decide where to put its hub station: in Moselle close to Nancy-Metz-Lorraine regional airport or in Vandières.

The project was, however, given a boost following a meeting in May between German Transport Minister Reinhard Klimmt and his French counterpart, Jean-Claude Gayssot. "We have underestimated the European calling of the TGV, which links not only the east of France to the network of high-speed trains but also France to southern Germany," said SNCF chairman Louis Gallois afterwards.

The ambitious Paris-Brussels-Cologne-Amsterdam-London (PBCAL) TGV network so far amounts to the PB, although work is now underway on building the Brussels-Antwerp and Brussels-Liege stretch, a project whicht just secured an extra 112 million euro in European Investment Bank (EIB) funding last month. Land clearance and track preparation for the London-Folkestone line is complete. Both are due to come on stream between 2005 and 2007.

The Commission managed to secure close to 5 billion euro for its TEN-T seed-funding programme during last year's difficult long-term budget talks. It is currently putting the finishing touches to new guidelines on how the cash should be spent. These are certain to buckle under pressure to introduce 'strategic' environmental assessments of the projects in return for public money and a greater emphasis on tailoring schemes to their ultimate users.

This means, once again, a stress on the need for 'intermodality' (projects using more than one mode of transport) and new services rather than just new infrastructure. Procedures for negotiating across borders should also be made more transparent and predictable, with information provided to public authorities at an early stage.

It is unlikely that the TEN-T programme will be dropped despite the impatience of many of those involved since its early days - recently retired European Investment Bank President Sir Brian Unwin described the whole project as "gimmicky" since the bank would have funded them anyway. But a Commission official said abandoning it would be "politically impossible", adding: "It has been a way of securing budgetary resources for transport and that means transport's advocates can't write off the idea."

Expressen, 1.7.10: 10 years of bridging the border (via PressEurop) http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/285601-10-years-bridging-border

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