Belgrade's first metro to run driverless on Alstom Urbalis CBTC

Lire en français : Alstom livrera le métro automatique de Belgrade pour 915 M€

Serbia's first metro will run without drivers on Alstom's Urbalis CBTC signalling, under a €915m turnkey contract for the first 15 km of Belgrade's Line 1. The contract was signed in December 2025, but the two tunnel boring machines were still on their way from China in late summer 2026.

Alstom announced the award on 27 March 2026, once financing was secured, for booking in the fourth quarter of its 2025/26 financial year, according to its statement. The Serbian government had hosted the signing on 19 December 2025 with Andrew DeLeone, president of Alstom's Europe region, and Andreja Mladenović, director of the public operator Beogradski metro i voz. Phase 1 runs from Makiško Polje to Karaburma, with 15 stations and 11 km in tunnel under the city centre.

One supplier for train, track and control room

Alstom acts as system integrator. Its scope covers 32 driverless three-car Metropolis trains built at Valenciennes in France, signalling and telecoms, traction power, trackwork, platform screen doors, depot equipment, a central control centre and cybersecurity. According to the Serbian government, the 32 trains are sized for the whole of Line 1 rather than the first phase alone.

Urbalis is a communications-based train control system: trains report their position by continuous radio to wayside computers, which hand each one a movement limit calculated behind the train ahead. That moving-block principle replaces fixed track sections and is what allows the headways of up to 90 seconds that Alstom quotes for Belgrade. Platform screen doors close the track off from the platforms, which matters on a line with no staff on board to watch the platform edge.

Handing one firm the trains, signalling, power and control centre puts the interface risk inside a single contract. On a first metro, with no in-house operator experience to fall back on, that is a sensible way to buy. It also means Alstom's testing programme will depend on civil works it does not control. Those works belong to PowerChina, the main construction contractor, N1 reported.

Tunnel boring machines shipped in August

Two tunnel boring machines built by CRCHI in Changsha passed factory acceptance and began their journey by sea and then along the Danube, Beogradski metro i voz said on 14 August 2026, with arrival in Europe expected by October. One will launch from Bele Vode station at Makiš towards Sajam; the other from a shaft at Karaburma near the Pančevo bridge. Each machine is about 130 m long with a 12.3 m cutter head, N1 reported in 2025.

Finance minister Siniša Mali has said Line 1 will be finished in 2030, the weekly Vreme reported in January 2026, adding that dates announced since 2014 have all slipped. Funding for the Alstom package is in place: a €150m French Treasury loan signed on 19 December 2025 and a €530m green buyer credit to the Republic of Serbia, backed by Bpifrance and arranged by Société Générale.

Belgrade's ambitions go further. The International Railway Journal reports a 7 km second phase of Line 1 to Mirijevo and a 20 km Line 2 to Zemun station, with both lines estimated at €7bn. Alstom is supplying driverless trains on other new networks too, including in Riyadh. In Belgrade, the next milestone is the assembly of the two machines at their launch sites and the start of boring.

Sources: Alstom (27/03/2026); Government of Serbia (19/12/2025); Société Générale (03/04/2026); Beogradski metro i voz (14/08/2026); N1 (25/08/2025); Vreme (08/01/2026); International Railway Journal (accessed 01/11/2026).

Photo: Belgrade Centre (Prokop) railway station, July 2018. P.Cikovac, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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