PHOTOS: Budapest-Belgrade rail line upgrade reaches milestone today

The project to upgrade the rail line connecting Budapest and Belgrade has reached its “most important milestone to date”, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said in Kiskőrös (South Hungary) on Wednesday.

Szijjártó said the last piece of track along a 150km stretch built by civil engineering company V-Híd and its partners had been laid. He added that the upgraded rail line would be completed by the end of 2025.

The project, with a cost of around HUF 800bn, will be the “most competitive” freight route for bringing goods from Asia from ports in the south of Europe to Western Europe, he added.

Szijjártó said Hungary’s economy had profited much from acting as an economic “meeting point” between East and West in recent years. He added that annual bilateral trade between the European Union and China stood at around EUR 800bn, while trade with all of Asia reached several thousand billion euros, and much of the goods from Asia arrived by freighter at ports in Southern Europe.

Szijjártó met with the wealthiest Hungarian, Lőrinc Mészáros to celebrate together. V-Híd is in the interest of Mr Mészáros.

Sándor Font, an MP representing Kiskoros’s district, noted that Hungary was partnering with Serbia and China on the construction of the double track. In addition to the Budapest-Belgrade rail line upgrade, V-Hid Group has also started work on a close to EUR 1bn railway project in the south of the capital, owner Lőrinc Mészáros said. Showcasing some of the company’s heavy machinery, he said V-Híd had spent over EUR 100m on equipment.

Read also:

• Partial operation begins on the Budapest-Belgrade railway line – read more HERE
• The Serbian line is ready – we wrote about that in THIS article