The Railway Administration has expanded the area on which the feasibility study for the Prague junction (ŽUP) will focus. The material on which the association of Mott MacDonald CZ, Afry, Ekola, Sagasta and SMA has been working for two years will now also include a trip from Prague to Benešov. This follows from the addendum that the Railway Administration concluded with the processor; the price of the study will increase by 2.7 million to 37.7 million crowns.

“The original assignment envisaged the development of a technical and transport-technological solution in five defined areas. On the basis of the work to date, we have come to the conclusion that it will be necessary to add a verification of the addition of rail capacities to the order, which will be entered from the customers of passenger transport and freight carriers. said SŽ spokesman Dušan Gavenda.

Specifically, it concerns the section Prague-Vršovice – Prague-Zahradní Město – Prague-Uhříněves – Říčany/Strančice.including checking the collision-free connections of new and existing parking capacities in the area of ​​Michle, Strašnice, Trnkova, Slatin, in connection with the prospective continuation of the new high-speed line from Benešov and the high-speed line from Běchovice”.

“Demands for suburban transport on the Benešovský direction, which proves to be one of the strongest at the entrance to Prague in terms of demand, require sufficient transport rail capacity in the section beyond the scope of the proposed solution from the previous feasibility study of VRT Praha – Brno – Břeclav,” added Gavenda.

The ŽUP study is intended to answer the question of whether there are “traffic, technically, economically and ecologically acceptable solutions” for increasing the capacity of the Prague railway and what they are. The partial results of the study show that the only possible solution in the center of Prague is to locate a significant part of passenger traffic in new underground rail capacities.

There are three variants in the game marked with the letters R, D and V; they differ in the second trains that will run underground. R envisages submerging urban and suburban lines, in the case of option D, conventional long-distance trains would run underground, option V would mean building tunnels for high-speed trains. For many years, there has been talk mainly about the R variant, which is being promoted by the city.

The Railway Administration will be clear about the preferred solution this year in November 2023. The period during which the investment will be evaluated from the point of view of costs and benefits is the years 2035 to 2065. According to the SŽ, construction can be expected until approximately 2050. The newspaper Zdopravy.cz wrote in more detail about of possible solutions for the Prague node last July.

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