The traditionally good cooperation between the regional offices of ČKAIT Ostrava and the regional Krakow Union of Construction Engineers and Technicians began to deepen after the emergence of the partner Polish Chamber of Construction Engineers in 2002.
On the occasion of a meeting in Ostrava in April 2002 a motion was made to provide our cooperation with a new and qualitatively higher dimension. The result of these efforts is an aggreement on cooperation concluded between the office of ČKAIT Ostrava and the branch of ČSSI for the Ostrava region on the one hand, and the Polish Regional Chamber of Construction Engineers (MOIIB), the region of Krakow, and the Polish Union of Construction Engineers and Technicians (PTZITB) on the other, which was signed in Krakow on November 25 2002.

The industrial areas of the region around the city of Ostrava are associated in the mind of the public with rich mining activities and as the location of the Vítkovice and Nova Hut ironworks. In this connection the presence of several train stations is for Ostrava a natural feature.

The first line to give rise to today's far-reaching railway network, running not only to the Ostrava region but throughout all of the Moravian and Bohemian provinces, was the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Line. At the start of the nineteenth century the communication paths of the monarchy were in a poor state. Not even the imperial roads connecting the city of Vienna with the provinces and their main towns were an exception. The "Halič Road" was an important axis of business transit running between Vienna, Moravia, Silesia and Halič, leading from Vienna to Mikulov and Brno and on to Hranice and Těšín through to Lvov. The primary cargo item was food goods for Vienna, as well as Moravian wool and woollen material on the way to Trieste. The transport of goods, for the most part arranged through carrier wagons, courier services, and stage-coach, was long and often dependent on the condition of the route.
A historical turn in the mode of transportation occurred in 1829 with the proposal of František Xavier Riepl, a professor of minerology and goods technology at the Polytechnical Institute in Vienna, to build a railway line connecting Vienna with the salt deposits in Halič and with the Ostrava region. The effort to make a connection with Ostrava testifies not only to a knowledge of local conditions but also to a large degree of foresight, at a time when given the just newly emerging steam-engine technology the need for coal was not yet that great.

During the course of the restoration of the castle at the end of the nineteenth century, with the exception of the Marian Tower almost all of the wooden ceiling constructions were changed. There was almost no doubt about the quality of the joist ceilings proposed by the architect Mocker, according to a detailed examination of fragments of the original ceiling work. These constructions were viewed and presented as an example of state-of-the-art carpentry work of the nineteenth century, which we regarded with admiration. Thus it was all the more surprising when static weaknesses in Mocker's ceilings began to appear in 1997, which had just reached one hundred years of existence.
The impulse for more extensive planning and construction work was the breakdown of the ceiling constructions of the arcade extension of the Emperor's Palace. The main cause of this - entirely untypical for the rest of the construction of the castle - could be described as a hidden fault in the structure (the eccentric mounting of the oak columns of the three-floor site). The column of the first floor, bearing the load of the two higher floors, was for no obvious reason founded on a single ceiling beam 580 mm from the axis of the girder and the ground floor column. In the spring of 1997 the ceiling beam under the column was weakened by a crack and ensuingly by a decline in the height of the ceiling constructions by 150-170 mm. The breakdown developed rapidly and if it were not for the brilliant intervention of one conservation architect, who introduced a provisional support, the affected ceiling constructions, along which tourist traffic continued to pass, would certainly have collapsed. This event became the motivation for initiating structural-technical assessments of the wooden ceilings throughout the castle, whereby other serious faults were detected. The results of the preliminary static assessment were alarming. A major part of the castle ceilings did not meet the necessary bearing requirements.