Railway project costing shockingly high would not even solve Budapest’s problem?

The execution of the Ferencváros-Kelenföld railway track will cost net € 936.7 million that will be carried out by V-Híd Építő Plc., directly owned by the richest Hungarian, Lőrinc Mészáros.

According to experts, the Southern Railway Bypass has become a tenfold overpriced project, but the price is only one of the problems, says 24.hu. The other problem of this severely overpriced development is that it does not substitute the dubbed V0 project. This project would divert the traffic of freight trains away from the Hungarian capital.

The problem

There is one further downside of the train track cutting through Budapest: noise pollution.

If the freight trains could avoid Budapest, the pollution would not be a problem anymore. However, there are designs to help mitigate noise pollution on the current tracks. Some say that is why the price of the project is so stunningly high prices.

Due to being only one Hungarian railway bridge over the Danube that can handle freight trains, it creates a ‘bottleneck’. The few kilometres connecting Kelenföld and Ferencváros railway stations handle both freight- and passenger train traffic.

The two railway tracks are not enough to properly serve the traffic, as besides freight trains, more and more passenger train use the same bridge, meaning that freight trains have to use this ‘bottleneck’ area when they can, leading to noise pollution around the tracks even during the nights.

To solve this problem, designs have been made to create a third and, in some places, a fourth train track to accommodate for the higher traffic of trains and the third railway track of the Southern Connecting Railway Bridge could be ready by 2022.