site.btaSerbia All Set at 200 km/h for Coming Elections

Last weekend, the high-speed Soko (“falcon” in Serbian) train officially took off along the Belgrade-Novi Sad at the height of the election campaign in Serbia. On this occasion, President Aleksandar Vucic commented that this particular railway line symbolized Serbia’s progress and showed the way the country was heading towards the future.

The first regular train carried 270 passengers, including Vucic and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, members of the Serbian cabinet, the Russian Ambassador to Serbia Alexander Botsan Harchenko, the Director of the RZD International for Serbia, Mansurbek Sultanov, diplomats and journalists. The train covered the distance of some 75 km between Serbia’s two largest cities in 33 minutes.

The one-way tickets for the Stadler trains with a maximum speed of 200 km/h cost 300 dinars (2.5 euro), this being the promotional price valid until April 30. After that a one-way ticket will cost 1,000 dinars (8.50 euro) and return tickets – 1,600 dinars (13.60 euro).

Construction of the high-speed double-track railway line between Belgarde and Novi Sad began at the end of 2017 and cost 847 million euro. The line is part of the larger project connecting Belgarde and the Hungarian capital Budapest.

The 34.5 km section from Belgrade to Stara Pazova worth 317.2 million euro, with construction funded with a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China and executed by contractors China Communications Construction Company and China Railways International.

Work on the Stara Pazova-Novi Sad section with a length of 40.4 km, a project worth 530.4 million euro, was contracted to the Russian RZD International. Funding was provided under a Russian credit.

Funds for the third part of the high-speed line, the 108.2 km section from Novi Sad to the Kelebija checkpoint on the Serbian-Hungarian border, have already been provided with a credit from China. Construction has already begun and should be completed within three years, Serbian media report. The rehabilitation of this section will cost 1.08 billion euro and that of the entire Belgrade-Budapest line – a total of 4.0 billion euro.

Last year, Serbia announced it would invest 6.5 billion euro in the modernization and upgrade of its railway infrastructure, the specialized Railway Technology e-zine reported. The investment will support the modernization of some 1,000 km of railway tracks and improve domestic and neighboring connectivity. One of the projects currently under development is the high-speed line between Belgrade and Nis, part of the Pan-European Corridor X, where EU grants are used mostly.

Rail transport is one of the basic type of transport in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure development strategy, and the Belgrade-Budapest line is part of this project which also includes connection with Skopje and Athens.

Also, because of its environmental potential, railway transport is central to the EU Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) which prioritizes the railway sector in European transport policy.

The completion of the high-speed route between Belgarde and Novi Sad seems to illustrate the efforts of the ruling in Serbia to balance their policy between East and West.  In this context, at the inauguration of the line Vucic thanked both “Russian and Chinese friends” that together with Serbs they had “helped build the country’s future”, while at the same time he also noted that Germans had been responsible for the supervision and the trains along the lines were of Swiss make.

Soko’s successful flight on the eve of the parliamentary, presidential and local elections in Serbia on April 3 definitely works in Vucic’s favour, whose manner of governance is also otherwise supported by most voters. The results of the public opinion polls indicating a victory for his Serbian Progressive Party, as well as Vucic himself as a candidate for another term, are quite indicative of that.