Simply expanding terminals on the Polish coast does not solve the problem, this is reported by the railway transport news portal Railway Supply.

Building a 1520 mm gauge railway to Gdansk

“A more serious issue is the need to transport grain from Ukraine to Gdansk or Gdynia, as there are difficulties due to the difference in railway gauge: 1435 mm in Poland and 1520 mm in Ukraine,” said Ukrainian Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food Nikolay Solsky to the Polish publication Puls Biznesu.

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“In Ukraine, there are far more grain transportation wagons than in all of Europe, from Romania to Portugal. This means that it makes no sense to invest in wagons that would run on European standard tracks. The only way to solve this problem is to build wide railways from the Ukrainian border to Gdansk and Klaipeda in Lithuania. This will allow Poland to earn transit revenue and send Ukrainian grain to the world through Gdansk. Furthermore, Poland will be able to build processing plants for Ukrainian grain on its coast and export the finished products, which will, of course, generate even more revenue,” Solsky said.

He noted that a year ago, a Ukrainian organization representing grain, oil refining, and metallurgical industries wrote to the Polish government about this.

The companies indicated their readiness to guarantee specific transportation volumes in each of these industries for the next 10 years.

There are investors in Ukraine willing to finance such an infrastructure project, the minister pointed out.

“The question that needs to be resolved is the Polish parliament’s adoption of a simplified procedure for such investment. Such a simplified procedure has already been adopted in Poland, for example, in the case of building an oil port or gas terminal. I know that this proposal has been analyzed,” the head of the ministry added.

As previously reported, the share of Ukrainian grain in the transshipment of Polish ports is 10%.

At the same time, Poland was considering extending the 1520 mm gauge to the port of Gdansk.

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