ew key questions jump out. Starting with why the hell is this needed? Well, let’s start with the Poland problem.
Shopan airport in Warsaw is the biggest and busiest in the country. Last year, it welcomed a record 21 million passengers through its gates, and is set to undergo an expansion to allow some 30 million to come through by 2029. But like any airport built in a city, it’s kind of limited by its boundaries and faces an overnight curfew of limited operations.
Poland is in need of a new central airport to be the face of travel in the nation. Part of the reasoning is the lofty ambitions of lot, the nation’s main carrier. It wants to expand its longhaul services to become one of the key players in world aviation. But given Shopan’s space problem, the airport can’t meet that company’s aims.
And with CPK, lots isn’t the only airline that could look to benefit. But it’s not just about economic potential. It’s also about what this means for the country’s residents. The team at CPK say that 300,000 people around Warsaw are impacted by flights at Shopan and that means noise pollution. Meanwhile, the Newport is going to be built here on a Greenfield site covering nearly 2,600 hectares of largely rural land.
That’s double the size of London Heathrow and nearly 20% bigger than JFK. The potential here is huge. Around 90% of the houses nearby have already been purchased through the voluntary acquisition program to create space for the airport. And modeling by the CPK team shows noise from the new facility is going to impact about 20,000 people, 15 times less than at Shopan.
The ambition here is clear and it’s pretty plain to see what it could do for Poland. But what about Europe as a whole? The continent has a few big transport centers, but as you can see, most of the biggest and busiest airports are in the west. Now, when I was researching this video, I read loads of articles, including some on London Heathrow and the recent fire that affected that site.
Trouble is, there were tons and tons of stories out there, and with so many conflicting sources, it quickly got pretty hard to know who to trust. But then I discovered this site called Ground News. It pulls together tens of thousands of articles from around the internet every day from almost every source under the sun. Now, obviously, every source is going to have its own angle depending on political biases and how they present the news.
Take a look at this story here. We can see there are over 300 sources gathered, and at a glance, the coverage is pretty evenly split across the political spectrum, but headlines can vary quite a bit, and you can see it right here. France info presented the facts of the Heathrow situation plainly, whereas Euro Weekly News questioned whether the airport might have overreacted.
Now, the really cool thing about ground news, and to be honest, my favorite part of it is the blind spot feature, which openly highlights media bias. It makes clear what’s being over or under reportported by different ends of the political spectrum. And that’s really useful for me because it means I can make sure I’m telling the whole story, not just getting one side of it.
Personally, I’m subscribed to their Vantage plan because it gives me access to absolutely everything. But the good news for you guys is that as viewers of the B1M, you can get access to that same plan with a 40% discount. Just scan the QR code on screen or head to ground.news/b1m. It massively helps us out when you go and check out our video sponsors and we simply wouldn’t be able to make videos like this without them.
So, please do go and check out that QR code and head to the link which is down there in the video description. It is ground.news/b1m. Right, let’s put that research to good use. As a central cog, Poland wants to connect central and eastern Europe. Now, a key part of achieving that aim is the Y line, 480 km of high-speed rail connecting key cities.
It’ll feature the longest tunnel in the country at 4.6 km under the city of W using a tunnel boring machine. It’s all part of the Poland in 100 minutes plan with trains traveling 200 mph to make zipping around the country as easy as possible. The line will then connect into the Czech Republic and onto the under construction rail Baltica, connecting easy links through to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
This really could become one of the best connected nations around. We’re expecting this to be successful. CBK has brought Inko on board as a consultant, having designed and constructed Europe’s longest highspeed railway in Spain. It’s safe to say the project is in kind of good hands. Now the W line’s main hub is going to be located at CPK, the brain connecting the entire operation.
At the heart of it is a massive new airport designed by Foster and Partners in collaboration with Bureau Hapold. And it needs to be ready for bucket loads of people. And a large scale terminal like this, it’s somewhere between one and two passengers a second for every second of every hour of every day, 365 days a year.
That’s the volume of people that are passing through. But of course, passengers aren’t arriving, you know, one and a half passengers per second. They’re arriving sometimes in thousands of passengers within a within a few minutes and within an hour. The airport alone is going to cost $12 billion, funded largely by Polish capital and some EU injections.
And the fact this gained EU support shows the potential the project has. It’s an intermodal model, meaning it operates multiple transport types. Phase one of the project includes two parallel 1.7 m long runways set 1.6 mi apart. At this point, the port will initially be ready to welcome up to 40 million passengers each year.
The site then includes a bus terminal, a rail station, and an airport terminal. It’s all connected by a central hub, so your travel journey is as straightforward as possible. But here’s where things really spice up. It all needs building at the same time. As we talked about, CPK is more than just a transport hub. It’s also hundreds of kilometers of highspeed rail and that’s already under construction in WH connecting to CPK then onto Warsaw and come 2035 down to these cities as well.
The Y line needs somewhere to go. So to connect to the travel hub, a tunnel needs to be created. It’ll be broken into four sections measuring 450 m to the east. Then another section towards the ports building around 800 m. There’ll then be another 1,200 m of tunnel underneath the main hub and a further 830 m at the western end.
The whole thing is going to sit 14 m deep running underneath the runway and partially under the airport terminal. Now, it would be impractical to build each section of this port separately and then create big tunnels underneath it. And it all needs to open at the same time in 2032. So this site is going to become a serious sight to behold once construction starts.
To really highlight how complex the design is, you can see here some of Foster and Partners internal infrastructure modeling. And this is only partway complete. The only other types of buildings this intricate are medical facilities. What’s really exciting is how this hub has the potential to transform.
You see, the design incorporates micro flexibility, meaning it can be chopped and changed over the years. and it looks set to be we design for that maximum and then we see how it sensibly reduces within that what’s the right starting point and then what then happens I think is the demand for what kind of aircraft we’re using how the building will respond how the railway station needs to add platforms how it will work up where it will work through all of those things start to come together and they will allow you to shift and change the building as it
moves now that’s important because the capacity here could grow to a staggering 100 million people a year at which point the site could look something like this. Quite a few European ports are created to specific dimensions and then over time as demand grows they try to find ways to expand.
And in Europe they are generally organically growing objects complex stretched tested in that kind of way. What doesn’t happen in Europe is what’s happening uh in Poland. At CPK, alongside this pretty unique intermodal model, expansion for the future is already thought about. That’s through the buying of land ahead of time and the design considerations from the outset.
It’s working 1, two, and three steps ahead. The ambitions of the Polish government can’t be underestimated. If you thought an airport, rail terminal, bus station, and nude highspeed rail service was enough to contend with, then think again, because this port is going to be neighbored by two brand new cities.
At the western end of CPK, beyond where the cargo is being kept, a cargo city is being constructed, although not by the CPK team. Then at the eastern end, an airport city is going to be built. It’ll start just behind CPK and feature a commercial center, but over time, it’s going to expand further east.
Of course, there are still further challenges to come. Building permits don’t always come easy, and it’s why the CPK site has been split into around 80 sections. For example, if 10 permits were to take longer to be granted than the rest, work could still begin on the other 70 sections of land. But all this was cast into doubt back in 2023 with a change of government.
A pause and audit was called for to review the project’s future. It was given the go-ahehead once again last year, albeit with some amendments to make the schedule more realistic. What still remains in doubt is the future of Shopan airport and what’s going to become of it once CPK opens its doors. The assumption is that people are going to slowly move towards the new port over time, seeing Shopan’s passenger numbers slowly shrink in terms of what comes next.
There’s still a lot of work to do. The final homes on the CPK plot need buying, permits need approval, and tenders need to be agreed for each stage of the work. With all that to contend with, we wish the team working on this the very best of luck. We can’t wait to see it open. It’s going to be one of the largest transport hubs of its kind on the planet.
It won’t just be game-changing for Poland, but for the whole of Europe, too. Thanks again to Ground News for sponsoring this video. It really helps us out when you click the link below, and it’ll give you access to a great free and trustworthy news source. Don’t forget that we’re inspiring the next generation of builders through our investment into Brick Borrow, a fantastic LEGO subscription service.
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