Rail Baltica is the largest cross-border infrastructure project in EU history. Cost trebled. Timeline doubled. The signals were in the data the whole time. This is the long-form Izere backtest — what the model would have seen, when, and what corrective action it would have surfaced.
In January 2026, the European Court of Auditors flagged Rail Baltica as the largest single budget failure in CEF history. The cost had trebled since baseline. Three Member States revised their completion windows separately. By then, the cost gap had compounded for fourteen months.
The signals were visible from Q1 2024. Bidder concentration in Latvia's contract awards had crossed a structural threshold three quarters earlier. Cross-state coordination cadence had collapsed by 60% in Q3 2024. The €5.8B baseline had been quietly amended four times before the formal cost reset was announced.
None of these signals appeared in any single document. They lived in the structure of the procurement and governance graphs — exactly where Izere is designed to read.
This is a backtest. We ran the v2.4 production model against the Rail Baltica programme graph reconstructed from public sources between January 2023 and the present. The model was given no information unavailable to the European Court of Auditors at the time. It was given only the structure: contracts, awards, sub-recipients, governance changes, milestone amendments, disbursement events.
The model's risk score for Rail Baltica was 41/100 in January 2024 — moderate, in line with comparable cross-border infrastructure programmes. By May 2024 it had moved to 78/100. By Q3 2024 it crossed 84. The European Court of Auditors detection — January 2026 — was 14.2 months after Izere's threshold breach.
Across 18 contract notices in 2024 Q1, the Herfindahl–Hirschman concentration index crossed 0.62 — three quarters earlier than ECA detection. Qualified bidder count fell from 11.4 (2018 baseline) to 6.0.
Joint coordination meetings between Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania programme authorities collapsed from 4.2/quarter (2022 baseline) to 1.7. Document throughput halved over the same window.
The original €5.8B baseline was amended four times across 2024 — none of them publicly announced as a cost reset. Cumulative amendment delta: +€2.4B before any formal disclosure.
National co-financing for the 2027–28 implementation window remained unconfirmed across all three Member States as of Q4 2024. Implied funding shortfall of €3.2B against the (then-quietly-amended) baseline.
What would the May 2024 risk flag have surfaced as actionable intervention? The system's playbook generates a recommended response based on which features are driving the score.
For Rail Baltica, the dominant attribution was F.001 (bidder concentration) and F.003 (coordination cadence). Standard playbook: deploy DG REGIO technical assistance to the Latvia managing authority; convene an emergency 3-state coordination session; commission an independent cost reset before the next CEF disbursement window.
None of these are operationally complex. All would have been substantially cheaper than the eventual €18B correction. The constraint was never capacity — it was timing.
It is tempting to read this case as a failure of the European Court of Auditors. It is not. ECA's mandate is retrospective sampling and special reports; their detection latency on a programme this large and this politically sensitive is consistent with their statutory role.
The failure is structural. EU supervision relies on programmes self-reporting against linear KPIs. By the time a milestone is formally missed, the underlying structural risk has been compounding for months. Linear KPIs cannot see the kinds of signals that drove Rail Baltica's failure — they live in the relationships between actors, not in any single actor's reporting line.
Izere is designed to read structure. The Rail Baltica backtest is one of seven we have published; performance is consistent across cross-border infrastructure (CEF), national recovery plans (RRF), and operational programmes (Cohesion). Backtests are reproducible — we publish the feature pipeline and ship the inputs as part of every methodology release.
Rail Baltica is now a closed case — the cost has compounded, the schedule has slipped, the institutional response is set. The question is what happens to the seventeen comparable programmes currently in CEF's portfolio.
An institutional Izere deployment for DG MOVE or INEA would surface structural risk across the entire CEF portfolio in real time, with monthly briefings to leadership and an audit pathway every score can be contested through. The deployment is reviewable in advance — methodology, model card, conformity statement, and audit access — before any procurement decision.