BEIJING, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Hungary-Serbia railway upgrading project has entered the stage of financing assessment for the Serbia section, which is likely to start construction in the second half of 2017, the Caijing magazine reported recently, quoting Wang Lijun, deputy general manager of China Road and Bridge Corporation.
The Hungary-Serbia railway line, linking Hungary's capital city Budapest with Serbia's capital Belgrade, has a designed length of 350 kilometers including 166 kilometers in Hungary and 184 kilometers in Serbia. It is the first railway project that Chinese companies have contracted to build in the European Union market.
In December 2014, China, Hungary and Serbia inked a memorandum of cooperation on rebuilding the Hungary-Serbia railway, which is a monorail originally built at the end of the 19th century.
Reconstruction of the railway line is expected to finish by 2018, when it will be upgraded into an electrified railway with designed maximum speed of 200 kilometers per hour. Upon the completion of the project, it would only take three hours to travel from Budapest to Belgrade, compared to eight hours for the moment.
The Serbia section is financed by the Export-Import Bank of China, and will be constructed by a contractor consortium founded by China Railway International Co., Ltd. and China Communications Construction Co., Ltd.
The Hungary section will be constructed by a joint venture founded by China Railway Corporation, China Railway Group Ltd. and Hungary’s national railway company in October 2016 in which Chinese companies have 85 percent interest.
The Hungarian government announced in mid-November this year it will offer 2.3 Hungarian forints, or about 7.86 million U.S. dollars, to facilitate the construction of the railway each year.
The Hungary-Serbia railway project, involving a total investment of 2.89 billion U.S. dollars, is expected to provide a shortcut for transporting Chinese goods from Greece to West Europe. The railway is also an important part of the planned China-Europe land-sea express, which will run from Piraeus port in Greece to Budapest via Skopje of Macedonia and Belgrade. Enditem (Edited by Li Xiaohui, lixh@xinhua.org)
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