Disastrous conditions: 2024 saw 7 years’ worth of delays at Hungarian railways
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Hungarian State Railways (MÁV) reported its worst annual performance since adopting a revised delay-tracking methodology in 2018, with trains accumulating 6.9 years of total delays in 2024. While the company’s public communications emphasised that 78.5% of its 1.14 million trains ran “on time,” critics argue the statistics mask systemic issues, particularly on regional routes.
Revised metrics and rising delays
Since 2018, MÁV has counted trains as “on time” if delays remain under six minutes—a threshold critics call misleading, 444.hu writes. Even by this lenient standard, 21.5% of trains (244,000) missed the target in 2024. Delays exceeding 20 minutes—which will qualify for partial refunds starting summer 2025—affected 5.9% of services (67,656 trains).
The total delay time reached 3.6 million minutes (3.8% of all travel time), a sharp increase from pre-pandemic levels. For context:
- 2018: 4 years of delays (2.54% of travel time)
- 2020: 3.1 years (1.95%)
- 2023: 5.7 years (3.23%)
- 2024: 6.9 years (3.8%)
Regional disparities and “statistical tricks”
Urban-suburban routes, such as Budapest’s HÉV lines, skewed national averages with 99.6% punctuality. Meanwhile, rural services lagged dramatically:
| Route | Punctuality (sub-6-min delays) |
|---|---|
| Székesfehérvár-Szombathely | 45.3% |
| Budapest-Győr | 74% |
| Budapest-Esztergom | Over 90% |
Analysts like Dávid Vitézy note that MÁV’s aggregated data obscures poor regional performance by emphasising high-frequency suburban services.
A Canadian civil engineer I know travelled on the Szentendre HEV recently and remarked that she saw things that would never pass safety regulations back home like a misshaped track that could cause derailment. The carriages themselves are operating East-German museum pieces. Maintenance needs to be done on railway lines before an accident happens. We already had a recent derailment at Keleti.