Construction, Estonia, EU – Baltic States, Innovations, Latvia, Tourism, Transport

The developer of the FinEst Link project on Friday filed an application with the Ministry of Finance for the initiation of a national designated spatial plan to prepare designs for a railway tunnel between Finland and Estonia and an artificial island related to it, Finest Bay Area Development said.

The developer also submitted a request to the Estonian Technical Regulatory Authority for the initiation of a procedure for the building permit for the tunnel and the artificial island.

The purpose of the initiation of the national designated spatial plan is to comprehensively solve the issues related to the railway tunnel both in the sea and on the ground. More precisely, the company wishes to find the most suitable location of the track of the tunnel in the economic zone, in the territorial sea and on land.

The main purpose of the construction permit is to start the procedure for a national designated spatial plan simultaneously with the conduct of necessary environmental surveys so that the surveys to be conducted on the Finnish side and related cross-border informing and involvement of the public took place simultaneously in Estonia and in Finland, the company said. 

"The railway tunnel between Estonia and Finland is a structure the like of which has never been planned or built in Estonia, and as far as is known it would be the longest undersea tunnel in the world," Finest Bay Area Development said in a press release.

The tunnel would be designed not just for serving passenger and cargo transportation, as it would be possible to use it also as a channel for data communication and electric power cables and other communications and piping.

The length of the Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel would be approximately 100 kilometers and the design of the railway would be based on an estimated maximum speed of 360 kilometers per hour. The company also is considering the possibility to use technologies such as Hyperloop.