Transport minister: first section of high-speed railway to begin construction next year

Work on building the first section of a planned network of high-speed railway lines in Czechia is due to begin next year, Transport Minister Martin Kupka said on Friday at a conference in Prague for entrepreneurs in the construction industry. The first section of the high-speed network will connect the South Moravian capital of Brno with the town of Přerov in the Olomouc Region. Trains on this new network should be able to travel at speeds of up to 320 kilometres per hour.

Work on the next section between Brno and Břeclav, a town in the South Moravian Region close to the border with Slovakia and Austria, is planned for 2026, while a third route to the Moravian-Silesian Region is scheduled to start in 2028 at the latest. If everything goes well, the construction of the Prague part of the high-speed network should start in 2030, the minister said.

The construction of high-speed railway lines in the country has been discussed since the 1990s, but concrete preparations only started in recent years.