Latvian railways - a rough diamond in need of care and polishing

The "transit" part of Latvian Railways is one of the real national success stories; helped by Russia admittedly, but business is business! 30% of the business is actually privately owned, taking nothing from the government and makes a profit. This is unlike the franchises in many other European countries. The main markets for Latvia are Russia and Belorussian, but they also bring and take goods to the Asian "Stans" and even to far away China. A common experience in Latvia is seeing and hearing the huge oil trains of 40 or more wagons rumbling and schreeching on lines that look simply far too delicate to hold such a heavy monster. I live about 600m from the railway and at night the whole building shakes as the full trains head for Riga and Ventspils ports.

One of the really clever things though is that all the countries share rolling stock. This means that goods or oil are loaded onto the nearest waggon and moved immediately. This greatly speeds up and increases traffic flow, and of course profitability. It is a clever idea that the EU could perhaps copy.

Lines are being slowly upgraded. Thales is upgrading the signalling from Ventspils to the Russian border and Bombardier are doing the next stage. There is though a lot of EU money unspent that the Ministry sadly has not got its act together to organise contracts. It may be lost.

Sadly, the commuter train story is a bit more bleak than transit. The Latvian railways are badly under resourced and also seriously in need of new lighter and smaller trains. At present the old large trains are still pulling heavy, often empty carriages. The government expects the goods profits to be used to subsidise people. This reduces considerably the scope of the railways overall. For tourists the good news is that travel is free. Well that is not quite true but many journeys are one twentieth the cost of their UK equivalent. The trains are frequent and clean, just a tad short on air conditioning in the summer. But you can certainly "see Latvia by train" although some journeys are a bit too much of a forest view for most. With Hotels as littl as 15Euros a night in places like Liepaja, a Latvian train holiday is great value for money

But one real anomaly is the lack of a train between Tallinn and Riga and then south to Poland. This line needs making soon please.