Opportunities for Cooperation between Estonia and ... - Valitsus

On continental Europe, rail transportation is growing in importance. Rail Baltica
is a plan to provide a railway link from Tallinn to central Europe. Even though
the plan is still in its infancy, all the potential it offers should be explored. A train
ferry service across the Gulf of Finland would be needed simply for transporting
goods, particularly timber, between Estonia and Finland. At the same time, it
would give Finland access to the anticipated Rail Baltica connection.
Although Helsinki and Tallinn are the most important growth centres in the
respective countries, no globally significant growth centres are expected to
emerge in the Nordic or Baltic states in the foreseeable future. Consequently, a
proposed subsea railway tunnel between Helsinki and Tallinn will not have any
global impact on the flow of goods. As it is, most of the regionally significant
goods transports are already handled by sea.
In January 2007, the European Commission issued a communication
concerning closer integration of EU transport system with the neighbouring
countries and guidelines for transport in Europe and the neighbouring regions.
In the communication, the Commission proposes the development of five main
transport axes for international trade. Of these, the most important to Estonia
and Finland is the Northern Axis designed to link the northernmost parts of
the EU to Norway in the north and to Belarus and Russia in the east. At the
same time, the Northern Axis would guarantee the EU’s access to the Barents
region.
Even if this scenario were to materialize, a railway tunnel between Helsinki and
Tallinn would, at best, only offer an alternative to current shipping services
without creating any really new traffic route either within the EU or between
the EU and other countries. Once the railway tunnel was in service, it would
mostly be of question of how the volume of transports would be divided
between the tunnel operator and the shipping lines (as in the case of the
Euro Tunnel between Great Britain and France or the Öresund Bridge between
Malmö and Copenhagen).
A Helsinki-Tallinn railway tunnel could increase transports between the Black
Sea, the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea ports, especially when goods are
carried from the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and countries in South
Caucasus and central Asia and vice versa. Additionally, the railway tunnel
would offer a direct route to Finland for goods shipped via the Suez Canal
from Asia and the Pacific (Japan, Korea, China and India). From the point
of view of Russia or other CIS countries, the railway tunnel would hardly be
competitive.
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