Poor Timetable
There is a daily cross border service between Estonia and Latvia, at the border station Valga, but the connection is let down by a poor timetable. Tallinn – Rīga connections are missed in Valga by 51 minutes southbound, and 39 minutes northbound, instead meaning passengers have to wait 3 hours 59 minutes when heading southbound and 2 hours 43 minutes going northbound for connecting trains.
What needs to be done: coordinate timetables between the Estonian operator Elron and Latvia operator Pasaûieru vilciens/Vivi to provide passengers with an easy and swift change of trains at Valga. Medium term extend Rīga – Valga trains as far as Tartu, Estonia’s second city (84km)
European Commission Analysis
In 2018 the European Commission published its “Comprehensive analysis of the existing cross-border rail transport connections and missing links on the internal EU borders”. The main report (74 pages, PDF) summarises the issues, and Annex 3 of the report (384 pages, PDF) analysed every single border.
For the sake of simplicity, I have made a PDF just of the relevant pages of Annex 3 that cover Tallinn-Valga-Rīga – you can find that PDF here.
Photos from this location
