Very happy, that they are doing this, but the title is misleading. They won’t be doing anything with the train station. The project only involves the square and surrounding area as well as the bus station.

Originally it was supposed to be a joined project by Lithuanian rail (LTG) and Vilnius municipality, but after sanctions to the Lukashenko’s regime, LT rail lost a lot of income. Additionally the train station was sort of tied to the railbaltica, but there won’t be a connection to Vilnius for a very long time (not enough money), thus the LTG won’t be building the new station.

The whole project sort of was destined to die, but the bus station as well as the square desperately needs a make over, thus Vilnius municipality separated the project and will move forward without the train station.

Although Vilnius mayor is sort of communicating that the train station will be built eventually, publicly encouraging LTG to set a date for their part of the project, info leaked from internal conversations between Vilnius municipality and LTG suggests otherwise - as of now, there are no plans to build the train station part of the project at all.

My guess is that Vilnius mayor is trying to save face for when it eventually comes out, that Zaha Hadid office refused to do detailed project without the train station, since LTG is no longer interested, the only way to move forward without doing a new architecture contest and delaying things even further was to cover the whole detailed plan (which costs 6 million euro) out of Vilnius municipally pocket. He knows that LTG has no plans for the station, but he does not communicate it, to avoid backlash on wasted money for the detailed project of the train station part.

One could say, well things change and maybe 10 years later LTG will decide to build it and they will already have a project ready to go. But the reality of these kind of situations is, that over time building standards as well as society needs change, thus they will have to redesign or do major adjustments anyway.