April 14 (SeeNews) - Serbia has launched a tender for the overhaul of its section of the railway line linking Subotica to Hungary's Szeged, a notice posted on the website of the infrastructure ministry showed on Wednesday.
The selected partner should complete the work within 14 months from the date of commissioning, as well as use at least 50% of domestic materials and hire Serbian subcontractors, the notice reads.
The deadline for the submission of bids is May 6, and they will be opened on May 7. A domestic or foreign legal entity, or a consortium of domestic or foreign legal entities can participate in the tender.
In October, the Serbian government said it hoped to complete the project for the overhaul of the Subotica-Szeged cross-border railway line by the middle of 2022.
Serbia and Hungary signed in 2019 a memorandum of understanding for investing 55.8 million euro ($66.7 million) in the reconstruction of the Subotica-Szeged railway line, in order to increase maximum train speed to 120 km/h and load capacity to 22.5 tonnes per axle.
Hungary plans to build additional sections of the railway line, linking Szeged to Hodmezovasarhely, Bekescsaba, and Baja, while the line can also connect to the Belgrade-Budapest railway, which is currently under reconstruction in the framework of the China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) cooperation initiative, the Serbian infrastructure ministry said in 2019.
($ = 0.83604 euro)