Four consortia chase the prize in Europe’s biggest rail tender wave
POLAND: Centralny Port Komunikacyjny (CPK) has opened the decisive phase of the competitive dialogue for the rail station and six-kilometre tunnel beneath the Port Polska airport, with the four shortlisted consortia invited to submit bids in the fourth quarter of 2026. CPK plans to sign the contract in the first quarter of 2027.
All four consortia that applied — eleven companies in total — were admitted to the dialogue in June. According to CPK, every bidder has Polish capital or a Polish base, a feature the company has presented as a deliberate outcome of the procedure.
The station hall will sit partly below ground with a volume of 1.6 million cubic metres, almost three times the size of Warszawa Centralna. Construction is scheduled to begin in the third or fourth quarter of 2027, and the station and tunnel are due to open at the end of 2032, at the same time as the first high-speed section between Warsaw and Łódź.
Who is bidding
The four consortia bring together eleven companies:
Mirbud, leading with Kobylarnia and Torpol — the listed Polish construction group, its road-building subsidiary and one of Poland’s largest railway track contractors.
Mostostal Warszawa, leading with NDI, NDI Sopot and Intercor — the Acciona-controlled Warsaw contractor alongside the Sopot-based NDI construction group and rail and road builder Intercor.
Porr, leading with Gülermak — the Austrian construction group’s Polish subsidiary and the Turkish contractor that co-built Warsaw’s second metro line.
Strabag, leading with Tym-Bud — the Vienna-based construction group’s Polish arm and the building and renovation firm of Waldemar Tymoszewski.
The procedure is divided into two parts. The first covers the eastern and central sections of the tunnel together with the underground station and transport hub. The second covers the western tunnel section and its track separations. All four consortia are bidding for both.
The tunnel will run roughly six kilometres on an east–west axis, with a volume of around 3.5 million cubic metres and a width varying between 50 and 160 metres. It will carry railway lines 5, 85 and 88, bringing air, regional, long-distance and high-speed services together under the terminal. Without it, the terminal has no rail access at all.
The 2026 tender plan
The station contract is one of 87 tenders worth more than PLN 54 billion (around EUR 12.6 billion) that CPK is putting into the market this year across the Port Polska programme’s airport and rail components.
CPK is running that programme without a permanent chief executive. The supervisory board dismissed chief executive Filip Czernicki on 30 July, and board member Marcin Michalski now leads the company in an acting capacity.
The network the station anchors is also the map on which Polish planners have drawn a 16-relation night train concept, built around the high-speed infrastructure expected to be in place by 2035.
