Serbia opens tender for Belgrade-Nis railway section revamp

Aug 5, 2026, 3:04:41 PMArticle by Valentina Bajic

August 5 (SeeNews) - Serbia's state-owned railway infrastructure firm Infrastruktura Zeleznice Srbije said it has opened an international tender for the design and construction works on a 65.2 km section of the railway line linking the capital Belgrade to the third largest city of Nis.

Train station in Nis; Photo by Phil Richards via WikiCommons, CC 2.0

The contract, which will be carried out under a project to modernise the 230 km long Belgrade-Nis railway line, covers three subsections of the approximately 83 km long railway stretch that connects the central city of Paracin and the Trupale village near Nis, according to a notice published on the EU's Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) platform on Tuesday.

The works, which will be financed by the European Investment Bank (EIB), include track reconstruction, station upgrades, new and upgraded electrification systems, and related railway infrastructure improvements to support passenger and freight traffic at speeds of up to 200 km/h.

The deadline for submission of bids is October 2 and the estimated duration of the contract is 48 months.

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The Paracin-Trupale-Medjurovo stretch consists of four subsections: Paracin–Stalac, Stalac-Djunis, Djunis-Trupale, and Trupale–Medjurovo.

Infrastruktura Zeleznice Srbije earlier awarded a 349 million euro ($403 million) tender for the design and construction works on the 17.8 km long Stalac-Djunis subsection to a consortium of Turkish firms Gulermak Agir Sanayi Insaat ve Taahhut and YSE Yapı Sanayi ve Ticaret. Preparatory works on the Stalac-Djunis subsection have already begun.

The overhaul of the Belgrade-Nis railway line is one of the largest infrastructure projects in Serbia. The main objectives are to convert the railway from a single-track to a double-track line and increase train speeds from 30–50 km/h to up to 200 km/h. Apart from the Paracin-Trupale-Medjurovo stretch, it includes two more sections - one from Belgrade to Velika Plana and another from Velika Plana to Gilje close to Paracin.

In March 2023, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the EIB and the European Union provided Serbia with a 2.2 billion euro financial package for the reconstruction and modernisation of the Belgrade-Nis railway line. According to a June 2022 estimate of the EIB, the total cost of the project is seen at 2.78 billion euro.

The Belgrade-Nis railway line forms part of Pan-European Corridor X connecting central Europe to Greece's Aegean port of Thessaloniki. Its branch - Corridor Xc, follows the route from Nis via Dimitrovgrad to Bulgaria's Sofia and Plovdiv and Turkey's Edirne and Istanbul, linking Belgrade with the capitals of Bulgaria and Turkey.

($ = 0.866 euro)