Work resumes on the Szeged-Subotica railway line after a year
"The Subotica-Szeged railway line has been built and will open its gates to passenger traffic from October," Vesić wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday.
The high-speed rail link will allow trains to travel at speeds of up to 120 kilometres per hour and cover the distance between the two cities in 35 minutes (by car, the journey between the two city centres takes 40-50 minutes, depending on traffic).
The line is being upgraded by a consortium of Russian RZD International and Serbian Karin Komerc and was originally scheduled to be completed in November 2022. Last year, freight trains were able to start running between Szeged, Röszke and Subotica, providing a detour during the track closure imposed by the renovation of the Budapest-Kelebia-Belgrade line.
The passenger service between Szeged and Subotica was originally discontinued in 2015 due to the refugee crisis. The 14-kilometre Hungarian section of the line to Röszke is the most expensive Hungarian railway project to date: it is being renovated with HUF 45 billion of purely Hungarian state money by the company of Lőrinc Mészáros, a gas fitter turned billionaire close to the government.
Telex reports that the development on the Hungarian side is not going smoothly, as the only thing largely finished on the section between Szeged and Röszke are still the railroad tracks themselves. The railway safety equipment is missing, the stations are not ready, and there is still a lot to be done to electrify the line. Work on the line is made more difficult by the fact that it is not possible to work on the line continuously because of the freight trains. This month, work has finally been speeded up to meet the 23 October deadline proclaimed by Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó on 20 August, but it could well be that the 120 km/h speed will remain a dream for some time to come. According to the specialist portal Indóház, the lack of safety equipment means that trains can only run at a maximum of 60 km/h, and trains will only be able to follow stations at a distance of one station.
(Reuters)
Cover photo: Getty Images
