The inauguration of the Pomeranian Metropolitan Railway

On 1 September 2015 the first passengers will travel by the new railway line that will connect the Tri-city and the Gdańsk airport in Rębiechowo. The Pomeranian Metropolitan Railway is the first railway in 40 years built from scratch in Poland. The contractor of the investment worth PLN 582.2 million net is Budimex, which in less than two years (May 2013 – April 2015) designed and built the line.
PMR will improve regional rail transport not only in the Tri-City but also in the Kashuby region. Gdańsk will receive a connection between Kartuzy and Kościerzyna which has not existed since 1945.
The investment covered:

• 17-kilometre section of the double-track railway from the station of Gdańsk Wrzeszcz, through the Lech Wałęsa Airport, up to the connection with the railway line No 201 Gdynia – Kościerzyna,
• 1.4-kilometre section of a single track PMR railway siding with the railway line No 201,
• 8 stops for passengers (in Strzyża, Niedźwiednik, Brętowo, Jasień, Kiełpinek, Matarnia, the Gdańsk Airport, Rębiechowo),
• technical station to change the direction of trains,
• the building of the Local Steering Centre,
• 40 engineering facilities, including 16 railway viaducts, 8 railway bridges, 5 flyovers, footbridges, culverts, animal crossings.

Budimex built and rebuilt access and internal roads. We also rebuilt the water supply system, sewage system, rainwater system, network gas, district heating, electricity, telephone networks and traction of SKM. Along the whole section we installed new lighting, built acoustical barriers and other equipment to protect the environment.
The Pomeranian Metropolitan Railway in numbers:

• railway line length – 19.5 km;
• the total rails length – 33 km;
• number of turnouts – 21;
• 28,970 railroad ties were built in all along the PMR line. If you put all those railroad ties one onto another, they would be 8.5 km high – almost as high as the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest;
• a total of more than 55 thousand m3 of concrete was used, which was transported by 6200 concrete mixer trucks. If you put all of them one by one, they would be 43 km long – the line of concrete mixer trucks would start in Gdańsk and end in Reda;
• approx. 1700 pieces of piles to support bridge structures were built in along the PMR line. Their total length is approx. 25 km, which is the distance from Kolbudy to Kartuzy;
• concrete used to build the PMR line weighs a total of approx. 137,500 tonnes, or as much as all the inhabitants of Warsaw put together;
• more than 7.3 thousand tonnes of rebars were used for the construction of bridge structures, which is more or less the weight of the Eiffel Tower. The total length of the rebars was approx. 3000 km – the distance between Gdańsk and Madrid;
• the length of telecom cables located within the PMR line is 134 km, which is as much as the distance from Gdańsk to Miastko;
• at the PMR stations there will be a total of 296 spaces for bicycles and 702 parking spaces for cars available;
• to cover and raise the tracks almost 60 thousand tonnes of breakstone was used, which is a capacity of about 3.5 thousand trucks. If all this breakstone was to be transported by only one truck 24/7, it would take a whole year!
• the longest bridge is a 950-metre-long overpass located at the Airport in Gdańsk;
• the longest span has the viaduct over the Trasa Słowackiego in Gdańsk Wrzeszcz (object length – 82 m).