A-Híd Bid HUF 10 Billion Under the Client's Own Estimate to Fix Hungary's Worst Rail Bottleneck. The Bid Was Rejected for Being Too Cheap, and the New Government Just Agreed

Since 2014, freight trains have crossed Budapest's Gubacsi railway bridge at 5 kilometres per hour. Walking pace. That bridge carries an estimated 10 to 15 per cent of Hungary's entire rail freight traffic and is the rail access to the Csepel Freeport and the container terminals behind it. When the state finally tendered its replacement, the cheapest bid landed almost HUF 10 billion under the client's own estimate. The client threw it out for being too cheap.

A HUF 16.62 billion bid against a HUF 26.54 billion estimate

A-Híd Építő Zrt., one of Hungary's largest civil engineering contractors and fully Hungarian-owned since 2008, bid in consortium with Swietelsky Vasúttechnika Kft. Their price was a net HUF 16.62 billion, roughly EUR 46 million. The then Ministry of Construction and Transport under János Lázár had estimated the works at a net HUF 26.54 billion. The consortium also came in more than HUF 4 billion below the next bidder, HE-DO Építő Zrt.

The ministry ran the price-justification procedure that EU procurement law requires before any abnormally low tender may be rejected, then declared the bid invalid: the justification did not credibly demonstrate the full technical scope could be delivered at that price. The Public Procurement Arbitration Board upheld the ministry. A-Híd took the decision to the Budapest Metropolitan Court and asked for the process to be suspended pending trial. The court refused interim relief. Contract signature was never blocked, and on 29 July 2026 the ministry told HVG that signature with HE-DO is still in progress.

The dispute is about quantities, not discounts

This is the part worth reading closely. The consortium did not claim a cheaper cost base or a bought-in supply chain. It argued that on several work phases its own engineering and technology calculations produced smaller real quantities than the sample bill of quantities issued with the tender, and that its price justification was professional substantiation of the bid rather than a modification of it.

That is a re-measurement argument, and it puts a hard question to every contractor bidding public work in Central Europe. Price your own take-off instead of the client's indicative quantities and you have converted a commercial risk into a validity risk. Being right about the quantities is worth nothing if the bid is excluded before anybody tests whether you were.

Seven bidders, and the cheapest one is in court

The bidder list is a map of the Hungarian market. Alongside A-Híd/Swietelsky and HE-DO sat Economy Home Kft., DSC2000 Kft. in consortium with China Railway Electrification Engineering Group (Hungary) Ltd., Generál Mélyépítő Kft., Züblin Zrt. of the STRABAG group, and Híd-Tám Kft. V-Híd Építő Zrt. challenged the tender conditions before bids were due, lost, and then did not bid at all. HE-DO qualified by relying on third-party capacity, naming Termini-Rail Építő és Szolgáltató Kft., Colas Közlekedésépítő Zrt. and M-Z Rock Kft. as its capacity providers.

Seven bids is a competitive field by Hungarian standards. The European Commission's Single Market and Competitiveness Scoreboard puts Hungary's single-bid rate at 34 per cent for 2024, against an EU average of 28 per cent. So a tender that drew seven bidders and ended with the cheapest one in administrative litigation is not a competition problem. It is an evaluation-rules problem, which is considerably harder to fix.

Twelve years at 5 km/h has a price too

Dávid Vitézy, transport and investment minister in the new government, announced the HUF 31 billion (about EUR 85 million) scheme on 22 July as part of the Baross Gábor Plan, the HUF 3,550 billion ten-year railway modernisation programme. The ministry has since clarified that the HUF 31 billion is a gross whole-project figure covering land acquisition, site preparation, permitting, audits and laboratory testing as well as construction. The new bridge goes up about 15 metres from the old one, with the associated track and signalling rebuilt. Works start at the end of 2026 and finish at the end of 2029.

Note what did not happen. The designs were complete and the building permit was valid; the previous government had simply stopped the project. The new ministry, whose own minister had campaigned partly on this bridge, reviewed the file and kept the exclusion in place. Meanwhile Budapest Közút awarded Híd-Tám Kft. a net HUF 94.7 million contract in late June to refurbish bearings and replace expansion joints on the parallel road bridge, where procurement documents record rusting cast-iron bearings on the Pesterzsébet side and shifted rollers on the Csepel side.

What it signals for the next packages

Hungary is about to spend EU money on rail at a scale it has never managed before, and Gubacsi is the first live test of how that money gets let. The signal to contractors is unambiguous: in this programme a deep discount against the client's estimate buys you a price-justification file, an arbitration hearing and an administrative lawsuit, and probably not the job. Expect bid prices to cluster nearer the engineer's estimate on the next Baross Gábor packages, expect more bidders to price the client's bill of quantities line for line, and expect the competitive lever to shift from price towards programme, capacity evidence and third-party capacity arrangements. For sponsors and lenders the lesson runs the other way. A client estimate sitting 60 per cent above the cheapest credible bid is not a safety margin. It is the number the market will eventually charge.