Twelve years after it was first announced, the Belgrade–Budapest high-speed railway is finally entering its final stage. A meeting scheduled for August 6 between Serbian authorities and Hungarian transport minister David Vitézy is expected to produce a concrete start date for passenger service on the full route. For a site that covers the aviation industry, the natural question is: does this infrastructure project, long billed as the “Serbian-Hungarian TGV,” pose a real threat to air travel on the Belgrade–Budapest route?
To answer that, it helps to understand what has actually been built over the past twelve years, why the project has taken so long, and what is technically finished — versus what’s still pending.
The project’s history: from 2014 to today
The Belgrade–Budapest high-speed rail project was announced in 2014, at a summit of sixteen Central and Eastern European states and China held in Belgrade. The contract for modernizing the first section was signed in 2017 in Beijing. The project is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and forms part of a broader strategic link intended to connect the port of Piraeus in Greece with Central Europe via Hungary, an EU member state.
The project’s total value at the time of signing was estimated at around two billion dollars. Financing is split by section and by country:
– Belgrade – Stara Pazova section — financed from Chinese sources.
– Stara Pazova – Novi Sad section — Serbia built this section using a Russian loan for railway modernization, based on a 2013 agreement worth 800 million dollars, with Russian Railways (RZD) as the contractor.
– Novi Sad – Subotica section (107 km) — financed by a consortium of Chinese companies, under a loan agreement signed in Sofia worth 943 million dollars.
– Hungarian section (Kelebia – Budapest) — financed by the Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim Bank), using Chinese technical solutions and contractors.
Why the railway has been delayed for nearly a decade
The deadline for opening the line has been pushed back so many times it has become a running joke in regional media. The first announcement promised 2018. The deadline then slipped to 2020, then to the end of 2022, and in recent years official statements have settled on “another month or two” — a phrase repeated so often it became almost a punchline.
The delays have several clearly identifiable causes:
1. A repeated tender in Hungary. Unlike Serbia, where the choice of contractor and financing model was never formally challenged, Hungary, as an EU member state, had to comply with European public procurement rules. The contract originally awarded to a Chinese consortium without a competitive tender drew objections at the EU level, forcing Hungary to re-tender its section to bring the procedure in line with EU regulations. This alone delayed the start of construction on the Hungarian side by more than a year compared to Serbia.
2. Technology mismatch with European standards. This was the most serious technical problem. China’s train control and safety systems were developed and standardized for the domestic Chinese market, where equipment is uniform and mass-produced across all track categories. The European Train Control System (ETCS), mandatory on infrastructure co-financed by or connected to the European network, has substantially different requirements for signaling, redundancy, and certification. The Hungarian consortium RM International at one point even withdrew its workforce and equipment from the Hungarian section’s construction site, because the Chinese contractors were unable to deliver a safety system meeting European standards. Part of that workforce was redeployed to renovate the existing Budapest–Vienna line.
3. Tighter oversight after the Novi Sad tragedy. Following the collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad in 2024 — an accident that triggered widespread distrust in the quality of infrastructure projects across the region — Hungary’s Ministry of Construction and Transport engaged the German technical inspection body TÜV as an independent inspector, free from the influence of the Hungarian state, the Chinese contractors, or any other party involved. TÜV’s task was to independently review the technical, financial, and safety conditions across the entire Hungarian section, including the signaling and safety systems.
4. The fix: hybrid technology. The obstacles around signaling system licensing were ultimately overcome by applying a hybrid technology combining Chinese and European solutions. This solution allows trains to run through Hungary at speeds of up to 160 km/h — below the 200 km/h designed for parts of the route — even under conditions of reduced reliability in certain subsystems, while full certification is completed.
What’s technically finished — and what isn’t
On the Serbian side, things are considerably further along:
– The Belgrade Centre (Prokop) – Novi Sad section has been in operation since March 2022, with a top speed of up to 200 km/h.
– The Novi Sad – Subotica section entered regular passenger service during 2026, meaning the entire Serbian section of the high-speed line up to the Hungarian border is now essentially complete.
– The Belgrade–Novi Sad section holds all the required international certificates for railway traffic safety and for traffic management and control on a high-speed line.
– Freight traffic between Serbia and Hungary on this line is already running without interruption.
On the Hungarian side, construction is technically finished, but the certification process and the alignment of safety systems are still ongoing — which is exactly the subject of the meeting scheduled for August 6. Sources consistently cite Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s statement that passenger service will be established “within a month or two at most.”
Interestingly, while the northern line is being finalized, Serbia is already preparing the next phase: Construction, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Aleksandra Sofronijević has confirmed that construction of the first section of a high-speed line heading south, on the Belgrade–Niš route, will begin during 2026. That line will be 230 km long and split into three sections. Work on the first part, the Stalać–Đunis section (23 km), begins with a Turkish contractor.
The August 6 meeting and the planned timetable
According to the planned timetable for 2026/2027 that Srbijavoz has provided to media, the Belgrade–Budapest route will run:
– 6 daily “Soko” train departures in each direction, two of them express services (no intermediate stops), with the rest making brief stops in Novi Sad, Vrbas, and Bačka Topola.
– 2 pairs of international trains operated by Hungarian carrier MÁV — EC “Avala” and EC “Ivo Andrić” — on the Belgrade Centre–Subotica–Kelebia–Budapest (Keleti)–Vienna (Westbahnhof) route.
The express Belgrade–Budapest train (Soko 150) departs at 5:06 and arrives at 8:14 — a journey of roughly three and a half hours. The trip to Vienna takes about seven hours and 15 minutes.
A notable feature of this rollout is that Belgrade Centre (Prokop) station is becoming an international border crossing — the first time passport control will be carried out directly at a city railway station in Belgrade. Serbia plans to carry out checks at Prokop, either before departure or on arrival, while Hungary plans to conduct checks during the journey, on its own territory — a setup designed to speed up border crossing and align with EU regulations.
Alongside the “Soko” trains, two pairs of international trains are also planned to continue on to Vienna via Budapest, effectively extending the line from the center of Belgrade to the center of the Austrian capital in a single seat.
Train vs. plane: is the competition real?
Comparing rail and air travel on the Belgrade–Budapest route isn’t a simple matter of “faster vs. slower.” Several factors shift the calculation in the train’s favor for a portion of travelers:
– Total door-to-door time. A Belgrade–Budapest flight takes about an hour in the air, but once you add transport to the airport, check-in, and security screening, total door-to-door time often exceeds three hours — which makes the 3.5-hour express train surprisingly competitive, especially since both railway stations (Prokop and Keleti) sit right in the city center.
– Frequency. Eight train pairs a day on the Belgrade–Budapest route (six “Soko” services plus two international trains) offer a frequency that a scheduled airline route would struggle to justify economically.
– Price and simplicity. There’s no extra cost for airport transfers, and border control is built directly into the journey.
On the other hand, air travel remains unmatched for any destination beyond Budapest or Vienna, as well as for travelers who still value shaving off ten minutes of flight time over the convenience of a city-center station. It’s more accurate, then, to talk about partial cannibalization of short regional routes rather than a general threat to air travel — similar to what has already happened on routes like Paris–Brussels or Madrid–Barcelona after high-speed rail was introduced there.
Conclusion
After twelve years of delays caused by a combination of EU regulatory hurdles and technological mismatches between Chinese and European standards, the Belgrade–Budapest high-speed railway is finally on the verge of full commercial operation. The August 6 meeting is expected to resolve the last remaining obstacle — aligning the signaling and safety systems — and open the door to regular passenger service.
For the aviation industry, this doesn’t spell the end of the Belgrade–Budapest air route, but it does mean a serious competitor on the short haul, with a frequency of departures and station convenience that air travel will struggle to match. It remains to be seen whether airlines will respond to this competition by adjusting fares and schedules, or simply cede part of this market to the railway.
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