STRABAG Signed Croatia's Zagreb–Rijeka Rail Upgrade in 2022. The Permits Never Came — Now COMSA Builds It for 53% More

In 2022, Croatia's state rail manager signed a EUR 228 million contract with a STRABAG-led consortium to rebuild and double-track a 44-kilometre stretch of the country's most important railway, the line from Zagreb to the port of Rijeka. The contractor was ready and the money was European. The one thing missing was a full set of permits. Four years later, that gap has handed the same job to a Spanish rival at 53% more.

A contract that could be signed but not built

HŽ Infrastruktura, Croatia's rail infrastructure manager, signed the Hrvatski Leskovac–Karlovac contract with a consortium led by STRABAG (STRABAG d.o.o., STRABAG AG and STRABAG Rail a.s.) in July 2022, for about HRK 1,713 million, or roughly EUR 228 million. The section is the central 44 kilometres of the Zagreb–Rijeka corridor, part of the TEN-T Mediterranean route linking the capital to Croatia's main seaport.

The contract never proceeded in its original form. Not all the necessary building permits had been obtained, so work went ahead only on a handful of individual structures while the bulk of the line waited. After an amicable agreement between STRABAG and HŽ Infrastruktura, the deal was unwound and a fresh tender was launched at the end of 2024.

The re-tender: 53% more for the same 44 kilometres

In April 2026, HŽ Infrastruktura awarded the re-let contract to Spain's COMSA Corporación at about EUR 278.8 million net, or EUR 348.5 million gross including VAT, once appeals from losing bidders had been rejected. Measured against STRABAG's 2022 figure of roughly EUR 228 million, that is a headline increase of more than 53% for essentially the same scope of works (sources: STRABAG newsroom, August 2022; Railway News and RailFreight.com, April 2026).

The work itself has not changed: reconstruction of the existing track plus a second line, electrification, modern signalling and interlocking, rebuilt stations and stops, and new bridges and viaducts, all engineered for speeds up to 160 km/h. It is co-financed by the EU Competitiveness and Cohesion programme for 2021–2027. COMSA is due on site in summer 2026, with roughly three years of construction ahead.

The permit gap is the pattern, not the exception

The instinct is to read this as one messy Croatian file. It is better read as a warning about where risk actually sits in CEE's EU-funded rail wave. The competitive tender was never the hard part, and neither was contractor capacity. The hard part was consents: permits, land acquisition, expropriation and design approvals, most of which sit with the public client and the planning system, not the builder.

When those consents lag, a signed contract turns from an asset into a liability. Construction costs across Europe rose sharply between 2021 and 2025, so every year a project waits, the same kilometres cost more to build. A stalled contract that has to be unwound and re-tendered does not just lose time; it re-prices the whole job at the new market rate. Croatia's 53% is that mechanism in a single number.

Croatia is spending against a clock

The stakes are rising because Croatia is running a rail programme worth close to EUR 6 billion to 2030, covering the TEN-T Mediterranean and Rhine–Danube corridors and regional lines, backed by EU grants and the European Investment Bank. In May 2026 it awarded its largest-ever single rail contract, the EUR 677 million double-tracking of the 83-kilometre Dugo Selo–Novska line, to India's Afcons Infrastructure in that group's first European job, part-funded by the Connecting Europe Facility (about EUR 289 million) and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (EUR 140.7 million for the Kutina–Novska stretch).

Cohesion and recovery money comes with hard spend-by deadlines. A re-tender that adds two years can push a project past the very funding window it was designed to use. That is the quiet risk under Croatia's programme and every other CEE pipeline racing to commit 2021–2027 money: the paperwork, not the diggers, sets the pace.

What comes next

For contractors, the lesson is blunt: price consenting risk into the bid, or refuse to mobilise until the permits are in hand. For public sponsors, the permits belong before the tender, not after it. For investors and lenders, a signed EU-rail contract is not a de-risked one until the consents are attached to it. Expect more amicable terminations and re-tenders across the region as 2021–2027 money is pushed out against deadlines, each one nudging the final bill higher. The builders who win the next decade of CEE rail will be the ones who can start on the day the permit lands.