The first meeting of the Hungarian and Slovak prime ministers, Viktor Orban and Mikulas Dzurinda, on Slovak soil meant, inter alia, also a first concrete result of 8-year efforts of the Ipel Union to restore a railway connection between Slovak Sahy and Hungarian Dregelypalank.

Open in 1886, the route connected Sahy via Vac with Budapest and via Balasske Darmoty with Lucenec. The traffic thereon was stopped in 1945 and in 1963 a 6.3 leg was cancelled by the Hungarian Government at the call of the Czechoslovak Government on political-military grounds.

The issue of route reconstruction was raised by the civil movement Ipel Union in 1992 as a protection-ecologic activity with an extremely significant economic impact. Connections are explained by the general director of the Ipel Union, Jozsef Wollent: "Polish-Slovak-Hungarian long-distance truck freight transportation is being effected along the road E 77 Krakow - Banska Bystrica - Sahy - Budapest. According to data obtained at the border cross in Sahy, the volume of transport has increased over the last 10 years by 350 per cent. If 18,600 long-distance trucks per year crossed the border in 1989, last year it was already 70,000. This transport is enormously burdening the town environment, which high economic costs to eliminate associated effects are related to."

If, according to the words of J. Wollent, the long-distance truck transport were shifted from road to rail transportion, besides unburdening ecology it would mean a rise in ZSR revenues that have fallen below the critical level just due to competition from road long-distance truck transport.

An important benefit to be derived from the route Sahy - Dregelypalank would be a restoration of passenger transportation. "Once a train set used to run between Krakow and Budapest and its restoration in category Inter City would make it possible to cover this distance in 4.5 hours," argues J. Wollent. "With a high frequency of Hungarian holiday-makers at Central Slovak ski resorts the train connection would facilitate and speed up the carriage of tourists and this is not a negligible fact with respect to a visitors' potential of the 3-million Budapest. Slovak tourists would in turn get easy access to Balaton."

The opening of the route could have an extremely significant impact on economic development of the Poiplie Slovak-Hungarian border area marked on the Slovak part with a 22.5 % and on the Hungarian part with a 18.5 % unemployment. Along Poiplie, bus service is critically sparse and should someone, for instance, need to travel from Sahy to Lucenec, so only by way of a 100 km detour via Zvolen. The rails stands a chance of handling the problem of passenger transport throughout the section between Lucenec and Sturovo, labour migration, thereby strongly affecting the economic rise of Poiplie.

The implementation of the project, thus the construction of a 6 km section from Dregelypalank to the border and a 300 m route from the border on to Sahy, will cost 800 million HUF and 1.5 million Sk. "And there is a problem just in this amount on both the Hungarian and Slovak parts," J. Wollent notes.

At negotiations between Prime Ministers V. Orban and M. Dzurinda in Bratislava February 12 also a letter from the Ipel Union pointing out the problem of involving the railway routes at Poiplie into European transport structures was mooted. Thereafter based on the outcome of their talks, Transport Minister Gabriel Palacka began to deal with the issue asking the Ipel Union to draw up a marketing study on the rail connection Sahy - Dregelypalank.

"I should be much pleased if we would manage to open the route until the end of the term in office and shift the freight transportation from roads to rails within five years," J. Wollent plans.

Slovak Trade FORUM