BIRN: Mandatory Work Plan for Railway Not Made in Years in Serbia

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The national program of railway infrastructure, an umbrella document defining the plans for building, reconstructing and maintaining the railways, as well as reporting on the executed works, expired in 2021, while Ana Brnabic was prime minister. The adopting of the new program, which is the government’s legal obligation, did not take place either during the subsequent government of Ana Brnabic, or of the current one of Milos Vucevic.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) reported on Jan. 23 that the national program of railway infrastructure was a document in which the Serbian government is obliged to take inventory of the country’s railways and define plans for maintenance, reconstruction and building of new railways.

BIRN added that, in the National Program, the government determines the priority works, how their costs would be covered and how quickly they would be performed. The National Program was introduced by the Law on Railways in 2013, and the program for the period from 2017 to 2021 was adopted four years later.

BIRN recollected that the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station began in 2021, that the reconstructed station was opened first in 2022 by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and then, in July 2024, by the province’s premier, Maja Gojkovic, and the minister for construction, transportation and infrastructure, Goran Vesic. Several months later, on Nov. 1, the canopy collapsed several minutes before noon, killing 14 people instantly, while one more person subsequently died in hospital.