Transport and Investment Minister Dávid Vitézy said on social media on Sunday that he and his colleagues had spent the entire weekend working on legislation that could bring home HUF 700 billion as early as this summer to finance new air-conditioned, low-floor HÉV suburban railway trains and InterCity multiple units. He added, however, that even if the funding is secured, it will still take many years for a new fleet to be delivered.
Reporting from a HÉV train in Szentendre during the heatwave, Vitézy said temperatures inside the carriage were approaching 45 degrees Celsius and passengers were drenched in sweat.
He added that nothing substantial had happened regarding the funding for many years. According to Vitézy, János Lázár halted the InterCity procurement programmes launched at the end of 2022 and cancelled orders for new Siemens locomotives that already had financing in place.
The minister wrote that the procurement of new HÉV carriages was first withdrawn under Russian pressure, then suspended for three years because of the Russia–Ukraine war, and finally János Lázár launched a tender during the election campaign “which everyone knew from the very first moment was merely campaign theatre and would end unsuccessfully.”
He added that, in the meantime, €2 billion in European Union funding had been permanently lost, funding that would have been enough to finance a major new HÉV and InterCity fleet. According to him, those trains would already be in service today.
“And then the failed prime minister has the audacity to say this week in Brussels that he expects his successor to recover this funding as well — funding for which he did nothing, allowed to be lost, solely to avoid introducing the anti-corruption measures requested by the EU,” Vitézy wrote.
He also said that a significant number of older but better-condition, air-conditioned InterCity carriages remain out of service at the Dunakeszi rail vehicle repair facility, claiming that “doing business with the Russians was considered more important than the interests of Hungarian passengers.”
According to the minister, the response from “Lázár’s people” consists “from the first word to the last of lies, personal attacks and accusations.”
“The crimes committed against the Hungarian railway system, its passengers and railway workers cannot be brushed aside so easily,” he wrote, adding that years of damage cannot be repaired in a single month, but that his team is not wasting a moment.
Artificial intelligence was used for the translation of parts of the original Hungarian text.
