Focus Koralm Railway Project
Based on the publication “The Baltic-Adriatic Traffic Corridor – The Diagonal Passage and Carinthia” (September 2006, Dr. Harald Eicher/Karl-Franzens University Graz), this website presents one of the great trans-European traffic corridors.
The publication is available as a PDF file (German/English) in the Download Area.
The Baltic-Adriatic Corridor
The difficult geographical situation of Carinthia, surrounded and confined by the Karawanken, the Koralm and the Tauern mountain ranges, has always made economic relations with neighbouring countries more difficult. Without appropriate, modern traffic infrastructure, we would have a decisive competitive disadvantage in the race for gaining access to the large economic areas in the South and North-east of Europe.
Forward-looking planning has always been one of the strengths of our Province, which is why we have decided to include one of the first international trade routes, the “Diagonal Passage”, in our considerations for the future development of the road and railway networks.
The Koralm Railway and the Semmering Base Tunnel projects will form one of the great European traffic corridors, a fact that is also acknowledged by high-ranking representatives of our neighbouring countries Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.
Even Russia has followed the discussions on the development of the Baltic-Adriatic Traffic Corridor with great interest and has joined these discussions to extend this corridor in the direction of the Trans-Siberian Railway
From Gdansk to Bologna
The former Hanseatic town of Gdansk as a seaport economically oriented towards Russia marks the beginning of the Baltic-Adriatic corridor as Eastern Europe’s connection to the economic centres in Northern Italy. All the immediate neighbours, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Italy, are committed to establishing one uninterrupted high-capacity railway line from Poland to Northern Italy.
The History of the Diagonal Passage
Since the Middle Ages, there have only been three continuous traffic routes in Europe that have endured as long-distance routes. The “Diagonal Passage” Venice – Vienna, also called the “Italian Road” or the “Venetian Main Street”, has played a predominant role. In terms of traffic and geography, it has been a favoured route, because it uses particularly low passes across the Alpine mountains, thus providing a shortcut that has made this region easily passable. It has also provided the shortest connection from Venice to Vienna and further on to the north.
Economic Importance
Infrastructural corridors are facilitators of prosperity. Traffic routes connect economic areas and thus contribute to the prosperous development of regions. As a component of the “Baltic-Adriatic Corridor”, the Koralm Railway in combination with the Semmering Base Tunnel forms an indispensible part of the European railway network. This has been documented in studies by the Karl-Franzens University Graz and the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS).
