Plovdiv-Bourgas Railway Rehabilitation Contract Signed
A contract to rehabilitate the railway between Bulgaria's second-largest city Plovdiv and the port of Bourgas was signed on Tuesday between the National Company for Railway Infrastructure and the Bulgarian-Italian consortium GSF-SK 13-Thrace Railinfra.
The consortium has offered to do the job for a price of 317 million leva (162.1 million euro), exclusive of VAT. The rehabilitation will reduce the four-and-ahalf-hour ride between the two cities by more than an hour and will allow maximum train speed to reach between 130 and 160 km/h, Transport Minister Aleksandar Tsvetkov said.
The project is financed from one of Bulgaria's EU-backed operational programmes, called Transport.
The Minister said he is glad that the contract bidding procedure was repeated, thus saving the Exchequer 110 million leva (56.2 million euro) in costs.
The contractor will work simultaneously on all three sections of the railway that need to be rehabilitated, wrote BTA.