Two Bids to Design the High-Speed Line Out of Běchovice, Both Under the Cap

Two bids arrived in the tender to design the Prague-to-Brno high-speed line between Běchovice and Světlá nad Sázavou, and both came in under Správa železnic's maximum permissible price. One is 333 million crowns, the other 346.7 million; the ceiling was 370 million. Zdopravy.cz reported the opening of the bids on 8 September.

The figures are all that is public. The report on the contracting authority's profile gives the bid amounts and the submission date, and nothing else — no names of firms or consortia. Which matters here more than usual, because the point of how this contract was written was to find out who would turn up.

A tender built to let foreigners in

Správa železnic says it framed the contract so that new foreign players could enter the market. It is the first design contract the infrastructure manager has tendered on that basis. The first attempt contained a number of discriminatory conditions; the manager then amended the tender documents to open the contract to firms that had had no chance on the Czech market before.

The stakes for the incumbents are plain. Sudop Praha is the largest supplier of design work on the Czech railway and, as Zdopravy.cz puts it, is existentially dependent on Správa železnic contracts.

Whether a foreign bidder actually came is exactly what the anonymised report does not say.

The ceiling nobody liked, and the two challenges

Before bids closed, the price cap had been publicly questioned. In July a query from a Polish firm appeared among the published questions, arguing the contract value was too low. In August another questioned how usable the existing zoning-decision documentation would be. The tender itself then produced at least two firms prepared to do the work for less than 370 million.

That has not settled it. Two firms are contesting the tender at ÚOHS, the competition authority, which is running two proceedings on motions from Sudop Praha and from Mott MacDonald. Both are directed against the tender conditions. Neither company is commenting on its reasons, and when a winner will be officially declared is not clear.

What the winner would actually draw

The contract covers the project intent, the EIA documentation and the design documentation for the construction permit, prepared in BIM.

The scheme itself is a new-build double-track high-speed railway from Prague-Běchovice to Světlá nad Sázavou in the direction of Brno, together with new connections to the existing lines to Kolín and to Nymburk near Poříčany. It follows on from documentation for the zoning decision that has already been drawn up. Both lines together come to roughly 106 kilometres.

One detail in the alignment is worth holding onto. Between Prague and Kounice the two routes run in parallel, so a stretch of almost twenty kilometres will be four-track. That is the section closest to Prague, and it is where the scheme stops being a line on a map of Vysočina and becomes infrastructure at the city's eastern edge.