Discussion of a railway that could link the European train network with the Arctic Ocean through Finland goes back well over a decade.

But serious discussion around the project gained traction under Finland’s most recent Arctic Council chairmanship (2017-2019) and was included in Finland’s 2017 updated Arctic strategy before fizzling out after the working group report. And Finland’s current centre-left government, elected earlier this year, makes no mention of a rail link north of Rovaniemi in their programme.

But Vesterbacka says he still believes in the project and that it could be completely built with private investment from places like China and the European Union.

In short, he says, the naysayers are simply wrong.

“The feasibility studies, the things done on the public side. Let’s just say they’re low on innovation and vision,” Vesterbacka said in an hour-long telephone interview with Eye on the Arctic. “They look at the world and see the status quo and not our collective future potential.

“What we do in start-ups, as entrepreneurs, is people tell us something is impossible and we go out and prove them wrong. We’re about getting things done and that’s what I think we can bring to the table with the Arctic railway.”

Kenneth Stalsett, CEO of Sor-Varanger Utvikling, the public Kirkenes-based business development company for the Arctic Norwegian municipality of Sor-Varanger, says the North needs this start-up mentality.

“It’s the same thing for the northern regions of Norway and Finland, like I imagine it is in Canada and Alaska, we don’t get a lot of attention from our southern capitals,” Stalsett said.

“The report was written by bureaucrats in the South and it was not very visionary. They don’t follow the trends we’re seeing because they’re writing it on standard inputs, that there’s not a lot of people in the region, not a lot of industry, not a lot of cargo and nothing to bring it all together.”

But with climate change transforming the North, new trade routes opening up, and almost weekly headlines on new Arctic investments from China and Russia, Stalsett says the railway, and a long-discussed new port project in Kirkenes, would create an Arctic transport corridor that could be a game-changer for the region.

Russia is making huge investments in the Northeast Passage, China is investing in icebreakers. The question for us is: Do we want to be part of it, or watch from Kirkenes as the ships pass us by? Kenneth Stalsett, CEO of Sor-Varanger Utvikling

Timo Lohi, the development manager for the Region of Northern Lapland, an area that encompasses Finland’s northernmost municipalities of Inari, Sodankyla and Utsjoki, agrees.

“The Finnish nation is considered as an island and we are very dependent on cheap transports,” Lohi said. “This Arctic railway is very important to increase the competitiveness of Finnish industry, but also to keep our companies in the North and to keep inhabitants so they don’t have to go to the South for opportunities.”

In March of this year, Vesterbacka’s company Finest Bay Area Development signed a memorandum of understanding for €15 billion euros in financing with China’s Touchstone Capital Partners to build the approximately 100-km tunnel between the Finnish capital of Helsinki and the Estonian capital of Tallinn.

The tunnel, a project Vesterbacka and his partner Kustaa Valtonen have been working on since 2016, would cut the average two-hour ferry trip between the two cities to approximately 20 minutes by undersea train.

Vesterbacka says his vision is about more than just railway, but about creating a new transport route between Europe to Asia, using the tunnel and the Arctic railway to transform this region of the North into an economic and transportation hub.

“These infrastructure projects are all just enablers,” he said. “To create gravity, to enable future growth and enable more well-being and happiness. Entrepreneurs and start-up entrepreneurs are all about making the world a better place and the projects I’m working on are all about that.”

Matti Kymenvaara, a forestry and energy expert and former member of the Finland working group at the Arctic Economic Council, an independent body set up by the Arctic Council that enables and promotes business activities in the North, says this big-picture vision of the project was absent from earlier discussions around the railway.

“This is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss,” he says. “If we have the tunnel link from Helsinki to Tallinn, and then the Arctic railroad, basically you have a rail link that would cover the European Union the whole way from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Sea.”

This isn’t just about Finland, this is important for Europe on every level. Matti Kymenvaara, forestry and energy expert

Vesterbacka says upcoming steps include doing their own feasibility studies and looking at potential routes and that he’s committed to making conversations around the Arctic railway more inclusive than in the past.

“Discussions around the Arctic railway have been very polarized,” he said. “The only way to deal with that is to share as much information as possible and engage in a dialogue once we have more information, but right now, because it’s super, super early, there’s very little to share.”

Vesterbacka says he understands Indigenous concerns but is convinced he can get everyone on board if people would stop long enough to listen to him.

“Not all things in the past have been done perfectly when it comes to Indigenous people,” he said. “That goes for Finland, the Nordic countries, Canada, the U.S., Australia… It’s a long list.

“So I totally understand where people are coming from and that they’ve been radicalized and are a bit more militant. There’s nothing we can do about the past, but there’s a lot we can do about the future.

“People say the railway will be the end of the Saami people and the Saami culture as if it is very black and white. I understand it’s an emotional issue but it’s difficult to have a productive dialogue because you can’t address emotions with facts, because in those cases, it’s like facts don’t matter.”

However, the almost two dozen members of the Saami community interviewed during the reporting of this story say that it’s not emotion driving their opposition to the railway project, but rather the effects railways, in combination with other pressures on Indigenous life, are already having on Saami communities in other parts of Europe.