The government will spend 4,000 billion forints (EUR 12.5bn) on developing public roads and railways by 2022 in order to strengthen Hungary’s position in logistics, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said on Friday.

Some 900 kilometres of high-speed roads will be built from 2,500 billion forints,

55 percent of which will be paid from the central budget and 45 percent from European Union funds, he told an event organised by the Hungarian Export-Import Bank and the Hungarian Export Credit Insurance Company (Exim).

A total of 1,500 billion forints will be spent on rail developments which will involve modernising 900 kms of tracks, he added.

The developments will extend the length of Hungary’s electrified rail network to 3,300 kms, the minister said.

Szijjártó noted ongoing and completed developments, including the electrification of a railway link between Budapest and Slovenia’s Koper. A new bridge on the River Danube at Komárom is already under construction and it will be suitable for freight transport from the first quarter of 2022, he said. Five new border crossings will be built in cooperation with the Slovak government and the EU funding won for this development will also enable building two bridges on the River Ipoly.

Preparations have been made at Rajka to expand a road linking Budapest and Bratislava (Pozsony) to two lanes each way, Szijjártó said.

He said that during talks in Beijing last week, an agreement was signed about the final timetable for the modernisation of the Budapest-Belgrade railway link. As we wrote, the Budapest-Belgrade high-speed railway line must be completed by the end of 2023 at the latest”, Szijjártó, who was on a three-day official visit to China, said. Read more HERE.

He also said that the prime ministers of the Visegrad Four Group have agreed to prepare the development of a high-speed rail link between Budapest, Bratislava, Brno and Warsaw. The Hungarian government has approved 1.5 billion forints for the feasibility study of this project, he added.

An agreement has been signed with the Romanian government about a high-speed rail link between Budapest and Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár).

The Hungarian government has approved 1 billion forints for the feasibility study, he said.

Source: MTI