The Transport Ministry intends to start Krasnaya Polyana double road construction in autumn.
Transport Minister Igor Levitin spent three days in Sochi to inspect transport infrastructural construction and summarised what he had seen for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and an International Olympic Committee delegation.
A combined highway-railway from Adler to the Krasnaya Polyana mountain skiing resort is the most ambitious transport project for the Sochi Olympics. Its construction is estimated at 242 billion roubles. 48 kilometres of rail track will be laid and electrified, with three stations, and a 50-kilometre highway will be built across an adverse mountain terrain in five years. The project demands 27 kilometres of tunnels plus bridges and flyovers 35 kilometres in length, according to preliminary estimates. An ambitious construction base will be built near the mountain village of Akhshtyr for the purpose.
Mr Putin and IOC delegation head Jean-Claude Killy visited a finished stretch of a highway circumventing Sochi. Mr Levitin met them there to report on the job done and what lay ahead. "The combined highway and railway are at the blueprint stage now, and construction will start in the autumn," he said. The IOC has set a strict deadline. The principal route linking mountain and coastal Olympic projects must be ready no later than the third quarter 2013.
The Transport Ministry has much more to do in Sochi. Mr Levitin visited the construction sites of railway freight yards and the first of the two planned cargo seaports. The yards, to be ready by the end of the year, will handle 15 million tonnes of cargoes a year. Large freights will come by sea, too. The first port, in the mouth of the Mzymta River, has a 5 million tonne capacity. Border dikes are under construction now, and the entire port will be ready by December 2010.
Oleg Galitskikh