Belgrade-Budapest railway: $2.37 billion, still no date
Hungary's transport ministry says no start date exists for passenger service. Chinese contractors are correcting ETCS software against a closing deadline. Serbia's section has been running since October 2025.
Serbia paid roughly $2.37 billion for its share of the Belgrade-Budapest railway, trains have been running on it for ten months, and there is still no date for the first passenger service into the Hungarian capital. The Hungarian Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure stated in a written reply that “no concrete date has been set for the start of passenger traffic”.
The obstacle is not the track but the software. Final tests are under way on the European Train Control System (ETCS), the equipment that supervises train speed and triggers braking on its own once a driver crosses the permitted threshold. The ETCS variant installed on this line is used in China but not on European railways, and that is where the incompatibilities come from.
Why are trains still stopping short of the border?
Hungary handed Chinese engineers a detailed list of the software faults it recorded and set a deadline for the corrections. That deadline is running out, and the ministry was blunt about it:
The deadline for completing these corrections is approaching.
If the fixes pass verification, trial runs without passengers could begin in August, and passenger service, in the ministry’s own assessment, “could start as early as this autumn”. The sequence is fixed: software first, then empty test runs, then a timetable. None of the three steps carries a firm date.
The ministry also drew a line it will not cross:
Until the Chinese contractor fully meets all applicable European railway safety requirements, the Hungarian government will not accept the system.
Work on the Hungarian section is being carried out by the CRIC-CCCC consortium, made up of China Railway International and China Communications Construction Company.
What the line has cost so far
The Belgrade-Budapest railway runs 350.7 kilometres, of which 183 kilometres pass through Serbia and 167.7 kilometres through Hungary. Design speed is 200 kilometres per hour.
The Serbian sections were paid for as follows:
- Belgrade Centre to Stara Pazova: $474.7 million including all annexes
- Stara Pazova to Novi Sad: $651.9 million
- Novi Sad to Subotica and the state border: about $1.25 billion
That comes to roughly $2.37 billion. A loan from China’s Export-Import Bank covers 85 percent of the first and third sections, while the middle stretch between Stara Pazova and Novi Sad was financed by a Russian credit line, with construction led by RZD International.
Ten months with Subotica as the end of the line
Serbia opened its share in stages. The Novi Sad to Subotica and border section entered service on October 3, 2025, and regular passenger trains between Belgrade and Subotica started five days later, on October 8, 2025. Since then the Soko has run as far as Subotica and stopped there, even though the commercial logic of the whole corridor is the link to Budapest and onward to Vienna.
For ten months, in other words, more than two billion dollars of track has been earning on a fraction of its purpose: domestic travel to Subotica, without the cross-border passenger flow that justified the investment in the first place.
Six departures waiting in the timetable
The planned schedule is already worked out down to the routings. Two international services run by Hungarian operator MAV, the EC Avala and the EC Ivo Andric, are set for Belgrade Centre to Subotica, Kelebija, Budapest Keleti and Vienna. Alongside them, six daily Soko departures in each direction are planned between Belgrade and Budapest.
Those departures have existed on paper for longer than the Serbian section has been carrying passengers. The next verifiable step is August and the first empty trains across the border.
