A decade since then Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić promised to rush from Belgrade to Budapest by train in less than three hours, the Serbian Progressive Party's railway venture lies in ruins. And the train doesn't even go to Subotica.
The latest fiasco is the cracks at Prokop, the new "central" Belgrade station, which can thank the removal of the old one for the sake of Belgrade on the water. Another large station, the one in Novi Sad, was closed when the canopy crushed 16 lives.
As reported by Forbes, the Railway Infrastructure of Serbia received the location conditions for the reconstruction of the platform beams at Prokop at the end of May, which no one informed the public about.
On the platform beams, "the appearance of cracks in the lower zone" was observed, so it was allegedly determined that there is less reinforcement there than what was designed back in the seventies. However, the IMS institute, to which they refer, denies that it compared the armature with the project.
You don't need experts to see the damage - cracked beams can be seen with the naked eye.
The Railway City company, which built the station building, rejects the claims that the beams cracked because they were built above, on the slab, heavy instead of the light structures that were planned in the 1970s.
They say that citizens have nothing to worry about: "It was concluded that the identified cracks do not threaten the load-bearing capacity and stability of the reinforced concrete structure below and above the slab, and that they do not pose a safety risk for visitors and employees."
As with the deadly canopy in Novi Sad, again no one noticed the problem in time, while the station building was being built, but later. All this shows that the "illegal contract" on the construction of Prokop was even more harmful than it was thought, announced Transparency Serbia. They remind that Railway City was paid for the work with land, the price of which was 3,5 times higher than the value of the work performed.
Prokop was "ceremonially opened" several times, the last time when the station building was completed in October 2023. "If it's done, let it be opened," said Goran Vesić, the Minister of Infrastructure at the time, for "Vreme".
Asked to explain Vučić's statements that he "brought the train" to the people, Vesić said: "When the president says he brought the train, he means that people have started using the train again. When you have railways that travel at 100 or 200 kilometers per hour, then people start using the train. And that's how it is."
However, apart from the fact that the stations are collapsing, there is no famous railway, at least to Subotica. Vučić's first promise to ride to Budapest in 2018 failed miserably.
This May, Vučić announced that high-speed trains will go to Subotica until July 7, but that too has passed. A few days later, he said: "Soon we will open the Novi Sad - Subotica railway line. Just so you can get to Budapest in the shortest, fastest, safest way. These are successes that we will only be aware of."
