TIRANA, Jan. 18 – Tirana will finally have its old downtown station back. The initiative comes as part of a project to upgrade the country’s dilapidated rail system by rehabilitating the key Tirana-Durres segment and connecting it to the country’s sole international airport through a new 5 km-link.
The downtown station first opened in the late 1940s under communism but was demolished in late 2013 to pave the way for the construction of a new boulevard, leading to a sharp cut in the number of rail passengers after the train station was transferred to Kashar, some 10 kilometers away from the city center, turning unappealing to downtown commuters.
“The removal of the train station has reduced the number of passengers by 60 percent and we thought about placing it back to its old place also as a symbol of the city. The new train station will only be destined for passengers while freight transport will remain in Kashar,” Thimio Plaku, a transport director at the infrastructure ministry told a parliamentary committee this week as MPs unanimously approved a €112,000 extra amount to redesign the major railway project.
Albania is expected to hold an international tender next March to select a company that will upgrade the Tirana-Durres railway segment linking the country’s two largest cities.
The project’s total cost is estimated at €90 million and is financed by London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, EU grants through the Western Balkans Investment Framework (WBIF) as well as the Albanian government.
The project involves the rehabilitation of the existing railway line between Tirana and Durres with an approximate length of 34.17 km and the construction of a new rail link approximately 5 km in length to connect with Tirana International Airport.
The state-run Albanian railways posted losses of 712.7 million lek (€5.27 mln) in 2016, up 32 percent compared to 2015 as both passenger and freight transports more than halved.
Only 89,000 passengers chose to travel by train in 2016, down from 189,000 in 2015 and about 4 million in the early 1990s soon after the collapse of the communist regime which banned private ownership of cars and public trains and buses were the key mode of transport, according to state statistical institute, INSTAT.
Rail freight transport, mainly carried out only through Montenegro, also hit a record low of only 76,000 metric tons in 2016, at only about a third compared to 2015 and eight times less compared to the early 1990s.
Albania would have already had a modern railway network in Tirana and Durres had it not unilaterally cancelled a contract with U.S. giant General Electric back in 2005.
In March 2010, the Albanian government was fined $20 million by an arbitration court over the unilateral annulment of a 2003 contract, worth €74 million with General Electric. The project cancelled in 2005 was aimed at modernizing the Tirana-Durres railway segment, known also as the electric train, which would have been linked with the Mother Theresa International Airport.
