The privatisation (and hence fragmentation) of public services - including railways - is written into EU law, and was part of the EU's DNA even before it was all legally mandated. That, in itself, makes it harder for railways to be supported as "a public good".
It's not privatisation that's written into EU law, it's separation of infrastructure and train operators, and the infrastructure being open to multiple operators (sometimes even more than just in theory!).
I think I'm correct in saying that in all the Baltic states the separate infrastructure and train operating companies are almost entirely owned by the respective governments, and in the case of passenger services operate almost entirely in their respective countries. The exceptions I can think of are:
- services to Russia
- services from Vilnius to Belarus
- that the joint Valga / Valka station is located a few hundred meters inside Estonia
- the track bed from Tallinn to Viljandi (and also the trackbed of the recently closed Parnu line) is privately owned
- The irregular services from Vilnius to Daugavpils and Kaunas to Bialystok cross borders from Lithuania
- The pre covid Ukrainian railways service to Riga (which they had been intending to extend to Tallinn).
Almost all recent infrastructure improvements and new rolling stock orders have been either government or EU funded and very little private money has been involved at all (for example, the private owner of the Tallinn - Viljandi line has a list of projects at
https://edel.ee/en/projects/ ).
If anything, I would suggest that it is the ownership by individual states that has tended towards the separation of their networks. State owned operators have tended to keep rigidly to their own patches (indeed as was pointed out Lithuania lifted a line that was more useful to the Latvian network, and the EU had to make them put it back). A pan Baltic operator would be likely to have made more effort to ensure connections between Estonian and Latvian trains at Valga, and would have been likely to have ensure better services over the Lithuanian / Latvian border.
The continuation (by overdue maintenance and upgrading) of the north-south rail link through those three countries would have taken a fraction of what was spent on new motorways (especially when including externalised costs).
The EU paid for the parallel motorway (Via Baltica) first, so the competition has had a big head start.
The previous cross border routes were incapable of supporting services that would be used by anyone in the modern era who had a choice of mode of transport other than a rail enthusiast!!!
However it should also be noted that only very short stretches of the E67 are motorway; very much the exceptions. It is mostly only one lane each direction with no grade separation.
The politics of the EU, and the commercial interests of many of its supporters, is part of what's led to a diminution of cross-border rail services compared to a generation ago. There's now the ridiculous situation of EU politicians wringing their hands wondering how to integrate rail services to enable passengers to travel across borders seamlessly, when it's their own pro-privatisation and pro-competition policies which are one of the causes of the problem in the first place. Ditto with respect to the environmental balance of air as opposed to rail transport; the problems now being acknowledged are a result of deliberate policies over many years by the same institutions which are now saying how awful it is.
Not at all. Not only did the decline almost exclusively take place long before the Baltic states joined the EU, but it resulted from infrastructure that was outdated beyond belief (in 1992 some journeys took about the same length of time as they did in 1938), from Belarus charging passengers from Bialystok to Vilnius via Grodno €40 for a transit visa, and because for historical reasons lines frequently pointed what had become the wrong direction (ie towards Russia). EU money has long been funding many of the improvements that have taken place.
From what I recall having been slightly involved a few years ago, it will indeed be a mixed traffic rather than high speed line. It is standard gauge only, one purpose being to connect the Baltic states (and ultimately Finland) better with the rest of the EU.
[snip]
If built I guess you might see a handful of passenger trains each day, running at up to about 160km/h.
The linespeed will be 249kph, so high speed by any count!!!