[en] The Vrancea zone is characterized by a narrow, vertical focal volume of intense and persistent seismicity in the depth range of 60-220 km. The processes associated with the Vrancea earthquakes outline a final stage of continental subduction with plate detachment, still far from being understood. Our main purpose is to perform local earthquake tomography to image crustal structures in Vrancea and adjacent regions as initial reference model in 3 D tomography. The study includes updating of the existing catalogues of seismic parameter data, calculation of a minimum 1D model and correlation with the existing controlled-source data. The model is determined by a trial-and-error process, with internal non-linear (iterative) inversion procedure (program VELEST). The average velocity model parameters are obtained by minimizing the standard deviations of the travel time residuals. The P-wave travel times for 500 well-locatable events are used, merging travel time data recorded by two separate independent seismic networks: the Romanian telemetered network (17 vertical-component S-13 seismometers) and the digital accelerometers network (30 three-component K2 instruments) installed in 1996 within the joint Romanian-German cooperation programme CRC 461. Since the two networks largely overlap geographically, we calculate a common minimum 1D model that guarantees a uniform location quality and uniform phase identification for the two networks. Absolute mislocation errors for the combined networks using the minimum 1D model are calculated using quarry blast data obtained during the VRANCEA99 refraction experiment deployed in 1999 in Romania as a contribution to the CRC 461 programme. The resulted minimum 1D model and station corrections are used to relocate all the considered events and to improve the consistency in the phase identification. The station corrections obtained are correlated with the lateral velocity variations in the surface geology of the region. This paper is a preliminary contribution to the future seismic tomography study in the framework of the CALIXTO'99 project. (authors)