The Ukrainian Railways joint-stock company (JSC Ukrzaliznytsia) plans to launch a passenger train on the Lviv-Lublin route, with a transfer in Chelm (Poland).
Oleksandr Krasnoshtan, the head of Ukrzaliznytsia’s department of long-distance passenger transportation, announced this in an interview with the CFTS portal.
"Lviv-Lublin, we are working on a train with a transfer. We want to launch a train through Chelm that will operate in a similar way to the Zdolbuniv-Chelm train. That is, we will take passengers to Chelm on a 1520-millimeter-gauge track and passengers will transfer to trains traveling to Lublin on the 1435-millimeter-gauge track there,” Krasnoshtan said.
According to him, Ukrzaliznytsia has seen great interest in this project, and it will most likely be implemented.
As reported earlier, three possible options for launching a train from Lviv to Lublin have been considered: the first involves transfer of passengers from Ukrainian trains onto Polish trains, the second involves the use of railcars with automatic change of track gauge, and the third involves construction of new tracks. As Poland’s Minister of Infrastructure Andrzej Adamczyk said in December last year, the first option is the most likely. “I think that this train may already be on the timetable by June 2019 or later in the winter,” Adamczyk said.
The decision to begin developing a new railway route between the two countries was made at the level of infrastructure minister last summer.
