Station Building of Rail Station Belgrade Center to Be Opened Tomorrow – The Road to Its Completion

Nearly five and a half years since it took over the role of the central rail station in Belgrade from the old Main Railroad Station, the unfinished station Belgrade Center (Prokop) will finally get its station building tomorrow. The final works before the opening are being brought to a close at the moment, primarily in the interior of the station facility. Nenad Stanisavljevic of the company Serbian Railways Infrastructure said on RTS that, in the building, the passengers would be provided with everything they need – restaurants, a cafeteria and a bakery.

– Tomorrow, after 47 years, Belgrade will get the modern and functional building of the Belgrade Center Rail Station. The facility has 5,600 m2 of space and will meet all the needs of the passengers who come to Belgrade and who travel on from Belgrade. The passengers will have a whole new impression and what’s important, they will have all those commercial features that the Belgrade Center Rail Station has lacked so far – Stanisavljevic said and added that the Tourism Organization of Belgrade, due to the large number of tourists who come to the capital of Serbia, would have its own info-desk at the station.

He explained that, from the station building, where they would buy the tickets, the passengers would descent to the platform section by escalators. He also said that the construction of the first and second tracks was expected and that the funds were secured.

– The first and second tracks remain, each around 500 meters long. I have to note that it wasn’t a part of the project of the construction of this station building, but the funds have been secured, the materials have been secured, and the beginning of the activities on the construction of those first two station tracks and that first platform between the first track and the second track is expected for the next year – Stanisavljevic added.

According to the most recent data, “at the moment, around 300 trains pass through this station”, transporting, as they point out at the rail station, “a large number of passengers”.

The job of completing the missing features in the complex of the rail station in Prokop was awarded to the company Railway City after it had made the sole response to the state’s invitation for partnership in building the features missing from this rail hub several years before. The agreement, which started being examined by Transparentnost Srbija not long after, envisaged phase-based construction, whereby the station building and a part of the parking area would be built in the first phase. The partner also obliged to finance the construction of the station building in line with the building permit, whereas the construction of other facilities would be in line with the partner’s market and business policy. Based on the signed agreement, the state waived the plate on the cote 105. On the borders of the plate, on all sides, parking lots will be developed, as well as a new garage on the part of the plate toward Senjak. When the agreement with the private partner was signed, as it was pointed out at the time, the condition was to first build the station building, with October 20, the WW2 Belgrade Liberation Day, symbolically set as the deadline for 2023 when the works started.

That the date is not disputed has been emphasized on several occasions in the past months by representatives of the state and PFB, the main contractor. In the past months, the value of the construction of the station building has been estimated at around EUR 17 million. The building permit for its construction was issued last summer, and the construction site opened on August 8. The developed platform part of Prokop officially opened nearly eight years ago, in January 2016, whereas the plate above it kept being developed over the ensuing years in phases. Its completion was the precondition for the beginning of the construction of the station building and commercial facilities.

Infrastruktura Železnice Srbije Beograd

Srbijavoz a.d. Beograd

Railway City doo Beograd

Transparentnost Srbija Beograd

PFB d.o.o. Beograd

Serbian Railways Infrastructure

Srbija Voz

Railway City

PFB

Transparentnost Srbija

Belgrade Center Rail Station

Prokop

Tourism Organization of Belgrade

Nenad Stanisavljevic

railroads

station building