During a parliamentary debate on the safety and interoperability of the rail system on Friday, members of parliament warned about a poor state of the rail infrastructure, to which Transport Minister Oleg Butkovic said that all problems related to rail infrastructure could not be solved in a single government term.

“We should not expect a single government, the current or the next one, to resolve all problems related to the rail infrastructure,” Butkovic said, responding to MPs’ criticism.

MP Miro Bulj of Bridge said that the rail infrastructure in Westerns was much better than the rail infrastructure in Croatia.

Bozica Makar of the Croatian People’s Party (HNS) said that over the past 30 years there had been no investments in the rail infrastructure and that new freight wagons had last been bought in 2008. The rail is the future for freight as well as for passenger transport, she stressed.

She added that around €1.5 billion was being invested in the construction of the rail infrastructure and that the most active was the Mediterranean corridor, connecting the northern Adriatic port of Rijeka with Budapest.

In late 2019 a contract was signed for the construction of a railway from Hrvatski Leskovac to Karlovac, and a tender will be published for the construction of an entire section to Rijeka, for which EU funds have been secured and which is expected to be completed by 2030 at the latest, said Butkovic.

Speaking of the Zagreb-Split railway, he said that the section passing through the central region of Lika had been upgraded but that the entire infrastructure could not be built in five years.

All sections of the railway running to Vinkovci are currently being designed and project documentation is being prepared, while the tender for the Okucani-Vinkovci section is expected in 2021, said the minister.

“The upgrading of the railway running to Slavonia is a priority, along with the Mediterranean corridor. There are funds for that purpose and preparations are underway,” Butkovic stressed.