Three days of rare business travel - Warsaw-Kraków-Wrocław-Warsaw, so a chance to see how Poland's railway network is faring. Passing through W-wa Zachodnia (Warsaw West) station in the way in and out, I am struck by the sheer scale of the undertaking - this is not just about rebuilding an old station but creating a transport hub vastly more sophisticated. Work here impinges on the neighbouring stations, the newly rebuild W-wa Główna and the oddly-named W-wa Zachodnia Peron 8.
Keeping the station - one of Poland's busiest (it is analogous to Clapham Junction) - functioning is hugely difficult, as half of the platforms are shut. I say 'platform' in English, but here I'm talking about 'tracks' (tory) rather than perony because of PKP's infuriating nomenclature which is at its worst at big stations like W-wa Zachodnia, Poznań or Lublin.
Below: icon of the modern face of PKP, a Pendolino InterCity Premium train pulls into Platform V track 4 (according to the timetable), or Platform 5, track 4 (according to platform signage). Be clever (bądź mądry).
Left: the nasty side of railway redevelopment - massive inconvenience for local people. The area to the north of W-wa Zachodnia has been entirely cut off. Entirely. There is no pedestrian access to ul. Tunelowa or ul. Prądzyńskiego from the station, nor to the bus terminus to the north-east of the station. Take a bus there expecting a short walk to the station, and you are stuffed. Travel to work to any of the offices south of Prądzyńskiego and you are faced with an extra 20 to 30 minute detour involving a bus or a long walk through an exhaust-fume filled tunnel. And it will be like this until early November, when presumably the footbridge linking the north and south side of the station is opened. Months of pain followed by decades of life-enhancing improvement.
Below: like an international airport terminal with train tracks running through it, the new W-wa Zachodnia will be a beautiful structure when completed. A 60m-wide tunnel and footbridge will connect all the platforms.
Our journey to Kraków was pleasant enough, though on a slow TLK train going around the houses (via Żyrardów, Skierniewice, Koluszki and Tomaszów Mazowiecki before rejoining the direct route at Opoczno. No buffet car; the catering trolley arrived minutes before we pulled into Kraków station. We survived, but pity the poor passengers who'd been on this train all the way from Gdynia.
Our train from Kraków to Wrocław (which would go on to Gdynia) was delayed by two hours because of a derailment west of Gliwice station; we arrived at our event an hour after it had started. The next day our journey from Wrocław back to Warsaw went well enough, but elsewhere on the network there were problems.
Below: trouble on the Radom line: delayed by 200 minutes the InterCity train from Kraków and 165 minutes the local train from Warka. The arrivals board at W-wa Zachodnia.
Below: I'm back in Jeziorki, my train (the 19:22 departure from W-wa Zachodnia) arrives on time at 19:49. A few minutes later, what should be coming through the other way, but the train that should have arrived at W-wa Zachodnia from Krakow at 16:00. By the time it arrived at Zachodnia, it was four hours and ten minutes behind schedule (250 minutes). The scheduled journey should have taken four and half hours (via Kielce and Radom).
The situation on Poland's railways right now reminds me of 2011/2012 in the race to get the railway infrastructure ready for the Euro 2012 football championships. Then, the ticking deadline was the opening game; now it's spending the money earmarked for railway projects from the EU's 2013-2020 financial perspective. Projects (such as the modernisation of the Radom line) which had dragged on for years, now need to be completed in a hurry. Never a good idea when it comes to railways.
This time last year:
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