Discover Hungary’s bizarre roundabout that connected to nothing in the middle of nowhere!

In an open field between Zalaegerszeg and Zalaszentiván, two towns in Western Hungary, is a brand new roundabout that doesn’t connect to…nothing!
It looks like an infrastructural anomaly and, looking at it from above, it seems like someone or something dropped it in the middle of a field and just forgot about it.
But actually the truth is that it is the result of failed government promises.
When it was first announced in 2021, the roundabout between Zalaegerszeg and Zalaszentiván madewas supposed to serve a new logistics center and container terminal of Metrans, a private logistics giant, allowing goods arriving by rail from the Adriatic Sea to quickly travel through Hungary.
The important development — even for Budapest
Between Zalaegerszeg and Zalaszentiván, a state-of-the-art container terminal was supposed to be built, connected by rail and road, so that the German-owned Metrans company would no longer have to transport every container to its northern terminal on Csepel Island before forwarding it to Western Europe. Instead, freight trains could have headed directly from here towards Slovakia, the Czech Republic or Poland, arriving from the Adriatic ports of Trieste, Koper or Rijeka.
In February 2021, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Szijjártó Péter announced plans for the new logistics center near Zalaegerszeg, and the municipality quickly applied for EU funds needed to build the access road and the roundabout leading to the future container terminal.
By 2023, the roundabout had been built with approximately 1.25 million euros in EU non-refundable funds, and the “only problem” was that the work on the container terminal hadn’t even begun.
In short, despite receiving European Union funding and completing, for example, the roundabout on schedule, the government remains unable to carry out the associated railway development, and without that, the investor Metrans refuses to build its container terminal. In 2021, Péter Szijjártó, the Minister for Foreign Economic Relations, made every imaginable promise.
And now, three years later, we are in the exact same situation.
No work has been done on the logistics center, so the roundabout is just sitting there, waiting to connect to something.
In order for the Metrans terminal to make any sense, it should attach to a new railway passing through it, but that project is still in the procurement stage, with not even a real estimate of when work on it should begin.
Either way, whoever wins the procurement contract will have more than two years to build the track, which means the railway could become operational by 2029, at the earliest.
And so, it’s difficult to say if Hungary’s roundabout to nowhere will ever be usable, or if it will just become just a bizarre attraction.