At Nádraží Krč the City Will Build the Station Hall and Then Give It Away

Prague's city assembly has approved an agreement with Správa železnic covering land swaps and other property matters around the future metro D station at Nádraží Krč, where an interchange terminal is to be built. ČTK reported the vote on 11 September. The same set of materials also carries the swap that gives the city the Holešovice land for the Vltava Philharmonic, which councillors had approved earlier in the month.

The Krč half is the more complicated one, because two investors are building on top of each other. The city is to build the metro station itself, a P+R car park, and a new railway station building after the existing one is demolished. Správa železnic is to modernise the railway station. Neither can proceed cleanly without the other, and the agreement exists to make the sequence legally possible.

The purpose of the transaction is therefore to create the legal, property and coordination preconditions for the individual constructions of the contracting parties to be carried out as a mutually interlinked whole.

— from the material approved by the assembly

Who ends up owning what

The land under the metro station structure goes to the city; the land under the new railway station building goes to Správa železnic. Prague pays the state organisation about 12.6 million crowns for the difference in value.

That is the detail worth pausing on. The city demolishes the old station building and builds the new one, and the new one belongs to Správa železnic. What the city keeps is the ground under its own metro box. The new building will be used jointly: Správa železnic for the railway, and Dopravní podnik, which plans to put the metro's control room there. The station and metro spaces will be directly connected.

Rail services are not to be interrupted while this happens. A temporary modular building will keep the railway station working through the construction.

The rest of the transaction

The other half of the deal is the one already on the record: Prague swaps plots around the main railway station, in the cadastral areas of Nové Město and Vinohrady, for parcels in Holešovice it needs for the concert hall. Správa železnic wants the Prague land for the planned reconstruction of the departure hall at the main station. The difference in value runs the city's way at roughly 152 million crowns including VAT, which the railway pays; in the other direction Prague transfers 2.1 million crowns to settle the difference in price for the easements being established.

Krč has been assembled piece by piece. Councillors approved a property agreement with the private owners of land around the railway station back in June; this vote settles the state's share of the same site. What is left is the building.

An interchange of this kind — metro platform, railway platform, P+R, one shared building — is the sort of thing Prague has more often drawn than delivered. The property work is not the interesting part of it, but it is the part that usually decides whether the drawing gets built, and it is now done.