2. Pan-European Transport Corridor No IV

DRESDEN - PRAHA - BRATISLAVA - GJOR - BUDAPEST - ARAD - KRAJOVA - SOFIA - THESSALONIKI/PLOVDIV - ISTANBUL

2.7. PROJECT No 7 (RAIL TRANSPORT)

NAME

Combined (rail and road) bridge across Danube River, connecting Vidin (Bulgaria) with Calafat (Romania).

DESCRIPTION

Construction of a new combined (rail and road) bridge across the Danube River, linking Vidin and Calafat. The Project includes the construction of access roads and tracks, and Border and Customs infrastructure.

The new bridge will be part of Pan -European Corridor No. IV from Berlin/Nurnberg via Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Arad, Craiova, Sofia to Thessaloniki /Istanbul. The new bridge is going to be operated by a concession jointly supervised by the Bulgarian and Romanian authorities.

JUSTIFICATION

The existing route (served by rail ferry facilities) is one of the two Danube rail crossings between Bulgaria and Romania a bridge serves (the other, between Guirgui in Romania and Rousse in Bulgaria). Only a bridge will provide sufficient capacity and adequate level of service for an international corridor. Any ferry crossing (even improved) can be only a short-term interim solution to the problem. The bridge at Vidin-Calafat ensures a considerably shorter route along the European corridor Greece-Bulgaria-Romania-Hungary and this fact should be seriously taken into consideration when the final location of the bridge will be decided.

EXPECTED BENEFITS

The railway bridge will replace the ferry crossing, reducing the travel time, and eliminating ferry loading and unloading, altogether substantially reducing operating costs.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

Mainly landscape visual intrusion.

Reduces air and water pollution.

Intrusion of waterway.

PRESENT TRAFFIC

The use of the ferry for transporting railroad wagons has been currently interrupted.

CONSTRUCTION PERIOD

3.5 years

ESTIMATED INVESTMENT

According to revised estimations (included in the official Governmental Programme of 1995) the budget is estimated to US $ 190 Ml. It is assumed that the allocation of the funds will burden equally the road and rail respective investments. Thus, for the scope of the evaluation, the project's budget is assumed to be approximately US $ 95 Ml. (Studies US $ 8.5 Ml.; Construction: US $ 86.5 Ml.)

Peter S. Green - New York Times Service

Isolated Region Along Danube Dreams of Truck Link to West

VIDIN, Bulgaria - The Danube rolls green and wide beneath the sixth-floor windows of Mayor Ivan Cenkov's office.

Every few hours a lone barge or a ferryboat packed with tractor-trailer rigs slips into the current and across to the Romanian city of Calafat.

For centuries, the river was the source of wealth for Vidin and Calafat. Wheat and other grains from this fertile valley were shipped upriver to the hungry markets of industrialized Western Europe. In the Communist era, new factories sent locally made machinery, chemicals and other goods up and down the river.

Now, the two cities are impoverished and isolated. Eight years of war, sanctions and finally the wreckage of the 1999 NATO air campaign against the Serbs halted most river traffic, while 11 years of post-Communist transition threw the region's centrally planned economies open to the vagaries of the free market.

From his window, Mr. Cenkov pointed past the symbols of Vidin's rich past, the minaret of an abandoned 19th-century mosque and a wrecked synagogue, to his hope for the future.

"There," he said, gesturing beyond the soot-streaked tiled roofs.

Just out of sight was a brown field where, if well-laid plans hold, a $200 million bridge will rise in the next five years. By linking this depressed part of the Balkans with the rest of Western Europe, the bridge promises to be a key to the region's revival.

In early December, the European Union's development arm, the European Investment Bank, finally approved a loan of ¤50 million ($48 million) to Bulgaria for initial work on the bridge.

Construction should start in the spring. When the bridge is finished, it will complete the E-79, a highway also known grandly as "Corridor 4," a mainly rutted, two-lane road running from Turkey to the markets of the 15-nation European Union, which both Bulgaria and Romania hope someday to join.

The road to Vidin from the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, is abysmal, an ordeal of pocked asphalt.

The ferry ride across the Danube, in Romania, leads to a road that is just as bad.

Trucks on the busy trade route bypass Vidin, crossing what is currently Bulgaria's only Danube bridge, nearly 320 kilometers (200 miles) downstream at Rousse, or they take newly reopened roads north through Serbia.

The Balkans' ethnic fault lines even affect driving routes. The bridge's supporters say Turkish truck drivers, nearly all of them Muslims, now prefer to bypass Orthodox Christian Serbia.

Under consideration for nearly a decade, the financing for the bridge finally came together late last year, after relentless pressure from Bodo Hombach, head of the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, a European Union initiative to funnel development aid and investment to the Balkans.

For years, Bulgaria supported the bridge, but Romania blocked progress, arguing for a crossing farther downstream.

"Their reasoning was very simple: Romania wanted to develop their port at Constanta" - on the Black Sea - "and get tolls from traffic through Romanian territory," said Nikolay Minkov, a business consultant in Sofia who has studied the bridge project.

Now, Bulgaria has agreed to take responsibility for the bulk of the construction, using European Union funds, and has provided money in its 2001 budget to rebuild the road to Vidin. Romania, now one of the poorest countries in the Balkans, has yet to announce plans for the road from Calafat to the Hungarian border.

With unemployment at 24 percent, Vidin is one of Bulgaria's poorest cities; the average income is below $100 a month.

Across the river in Calafat, unemployment is 72 percent, and average incomes are a mere $50 a month or so.

For the hard-pressed people of this area, the bridge promises jobs and an improvement in their standard of living. And it promises to put their cities, quite literally, on the road to Europe.

"This city is in a terrible economic condition," Mr. Cenkov said. The region's biggest employer, the Vidachim rubber factory, closed last year, throwing 3,500 people out of work.

"The investment climate will change after the start of the bridge," he said with confidence.

Across the river in Calafat, Mayor Petre Traistaru greets guests in his overcoat in the underheated city hall, a curved and filigreed Beaux Arts mansion built a century ago for a local magnate. It is a dim echo of Calafat's wealthy past, when dozens of such mansions lined the Via Traiana, the city's main road.

With unemployment officially at 72 percent in his town of 20,000, Mr. Traistaru summed up his quandary neatly: "The problem is the economy doesn't work well here."

Indeed, seven of the town's eight factories are shut. Only the textile factory still functions, doing piecework for an Italian company.

"The bridge means a better life," he said. It will restart the local economy, bringing foreign investment attracted by the city's new position alongside a major trading route and by what is unfortunately Calafat's greatest resource - thousands of skilled but unemployed workers, artisans, engineers and administrators laid off as the local economy crumbled under the onslaught of the free market.

Building the bridge itself will provide several thousand jobs for the region and perhaps bring hundreds of trucks and rail cars daily across the Danube, turning the city into a regional freight transportation center and building a ribbon of prosperity through this blighted corner of the Balkans.

Truck stops, garages and eventually small manufacturers are expected to settle along the road, with easier access to Europe.

European Union officials say it is impossible to forecast the bridge's economic effect, but as Bulgaria and Romania move toward eventual European Union membership, they say, more and better roads are needed to link the Balkans firmly to the rest of Europe. Naysayers such as Krassen Stanchev, director of the Institute for Market Economics in Sofia, argue that the bridge is a decade too late, particularly now that Yugoslavia's wars of the last decade have ended and the Danube is expected to reopen to shipping in the spring.

"It's a temporary fix for the economy, because traffic is not huge - who will come?" Mr. Stanchev asked. Pressing customs agents and ferry operators to improve service, he said, could do enough to speed up traffic, but "only when and if trade develops will the bridge make sense." Others take a more nuanced view. "It's part of a chain," said Hristo Tomov, director of Vidin's tax-free industrial zone. "If there's a bridge, it means there's more stability in the region, and people will say, 'If the European Union invests, why not me?'"

He said he hoped investors would seize on the region's skilled work force to help create small and medium-sized manufacturers once the bridge went up.

For Mr. Cenkov, the bridge is a field of dreams - build it, and the trucks and trains will come.

"Everyone knows that to have trade, you need commercial routes," he said.

"This is the shortest route to Scandinavia, and it is an independent alternative to Western Europe."
(International Herald Tribune)