Terrible Hungarian specialty: Our trains 3.5 years late in 2017

Hungarian trains are infamous for the critical amount of delays. Index.hu summarised the data retrieved from MÁV (Hungarian State Railways) to find out how serious this problem was last year. The total delay throughout the whole network was precisely 1,831,556 minutes. This is approximately 3.5 years altogether.

According to Index, this tendency is quite standard in Hungary; the average delay has been 1.77 years in every six months between 2008 and 2014. The enormous investments do not seem to show any impact on punctuality.

There is about a 12.5% chance that anyone who takes a train in Hungary will be late. Occasionally, this might mean that they will miss their transfer.  

This huge amount of delay was gathered by 120,423 trains, which is one-eighth of the total number of trains travelling across Hungary in a year.  The average delay was around 15.2 minutes per person in 2017. A train which derailed in Esztergom set the record; the process of repairs took 971 minutes (more than 16 hours).

The bad news is that these numbers are somewhat rounded down. MÁV uses the UIC standard to calculate the data, so delays under 6 minutes are not even taken into account. If a train is 5 minutes 59 seconds late, it is considered accurate. This means that the real total delay can be much more than indicated.

Index examined the delays from the perspective of railway tracks: it was revealed that the highest risk of delay is on the lines to two cities in the Southern region, Pécs and Szeged (with 28 and 25 percent of the trains being late, respectively).