A South Korean consortium has won a $33m contract to design a 70km-long section of high-speed railway in Poland linking the southern city of Katowice to Ostrava on the Czech border.

The project falls under Poland’s “Centralny Port Komunikacyjny” (Central Communication Port) scheme, or CPK, which aims to integrate air, road, and rail transport.

One of the biggest ongoing infrastructure projects in Central Europe, CPK will see a new international airport built near Warsaw, plus 2,000km of new high-speed rail.

The goal is to put Warsaw within 2.5 hours of all major Polish cities.

The Katowice-Ostrava line is part of the EU’s Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) connecting Katowice, Warsaw and Krakow with Brno, Prague, Bratislava, Vienna and Budapest.

Designing the 250km/h Polish section is a joint venture of state-owned Korea National Railway and Dohwa Engineering.

Announcing the award, CPK said the line would be a “civilisational leap”, turning Upper Silesia into a transport hub for the entire Three Seas region, a group of 12 EU states bordered by the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black seas.

Earlier in June, Poland’s infrastructure ministry approved the master plan of the new CPK airport, to be built on some 3,000 hectares 37km west of Warsaw.

The first phase of the plan sees the airport, with its Foster + Partners-designed terminal, serving 40 million passengers a year with two parallel runways by 2028.

The second phase to 2060 sees it serving 65 million passengers annually with three runways.