Poland's CPK High-Speed Rail Tender Draws Eight Bidders for Warsaw–Łódź Section

Eight bidders lined up for a single 14.3-kilometre stretch of track. That is the appetite Poland's Central Communication Port (CPK) just confirmed for the backbone of what will be Central Europe's largest greenfield high-speed railway, and it says more about the health of the European construction market than any contractor's order-book statement.

A short section, a long queue of suitors

On 6 July 2026, CPK confirmed it had received eight requests to participate in the tender for the Airport Junction – Bolimów Junction section of the Warsaw–Łódź high-speed line, according to the International Railway Journal. The line-up reads like a roll-call of the contractors that matter across Central and Eastern Europe: Strabag with Tym-Bud, Porr with Trakcja, Budimex bidding alone, a Torpol–Mirbud–Kobylarnia trio, Zue alongside Duna Polska and Polaqua, a four-way consortium led by Gülermak, Mostostal Warsaw, and an Ntercor–NDI grouping. CPK will invite up to five of them into a competitive dialogue.

The scope is anything but token. The winner designs and builds a 350 km/h alignment carrying 55 road and railway bridges and viaducts, plus drainage culverts and wildlife crossings, and delivers the full detailed design. This is the second of six construction packages on the Warsaw–Łódź route, the first inter-city leg of a network that will later reach Poznań and Wrocław.

The Warsaw–Łódź line is being carved into six construction packages, and CPK now has two of them running at once. A procurement launched in December 2025 for the 12.9km Kotowice – Airport Junction section is in the final stage of shortlisting, while preparations continue on the remaining stretches, including an 18km tunnel between Warsaw West and Kotowice and the longer Bolimów Junction – Brzeziny leg. Splitting the route this way spreads risk across contractors and keeps any single failure from stalling the whole line.

Why competitive dialogue, not a straight open tender

Poland has no true high-speed track today. Building the first 350 km/h line in a country without the reference base is exactly the situation where a client benefits from talking to the market before freezing the specification. Competitive dialogue lets CPK refine scope, risk allocation and buildability with shortlisted bidders before final bids land. "The competitive dialogue process has provided us with valuable market feedback that will enable us to launch the remaining procurements as open tenders," CPK rail board member Piotr Rachwalski said. In other words, the early packages are buying market intelligence that de-risks the larger ones behind them.

The Rail Baltica warning hanging over every mega-tender

The caution is well founded. In March 2026, a Polish appeals panel struck down PKP PLK's award of the roughly €1.2bn Białystok–Ełk section of Rail Baltica to a Budimex-led consortium that included Porr, throwing the contract back into play. One annulled award can cost a year. A dialogue-first process, with criteria hammered out in the open with bidders, is partly an answer to that litigation risk, and a reason the CPK field is so deep.

What the depth of the field signals

Eight bidders for one section is a vote of confidence at a moment when Western European rail budgets are wobbling. Germany's latest budget sent what the trade press called "mixed messages" for rail on 8 July 2026, and Deutsche Bahn has just confirmed the Stuttgart 21 project will slip to 2031 and cost another €3bn. Against that backdrop, contractors are hunting for clean, well-funded, greenfield work with a defined pipeline, and CPK offers exactly that. The port operator has set out a tender pipeline worth around $10bn for 2026, according to Aviation Week, spanning rail, the hub airport and the road links that feed it. Poland is also one of the largest recipients of EU cohesion and recovery funding, giving the CPK programme a financing base that many Western European schemes now envy as national budgets tighten.

Implications for contractors, sponsors and lenders

For contractors, the logic is to position now. The firm that wins an early Warsaw–Łódź package builds the reference credentials that shape the remaining four sections and the Poznań and Wrocław extensions expected around 2035. For public sponsors elsewhere in the region, CPK is becoming a live case study in how to procure a first-of-its-kind programme without inviting the appeals that have stalled rivals. For lenders and infrastructure investors, a competitive, litigation-resistant procurement is what separates a bankable pipeline from a stalled one. The Warsaw–Łódź section is due to open in 2032. The field forming around it this summer will decide who gets to build Central Europe's high-speed future.