Today, when people talk about Hyperloop, TGV and other types of high-speed trains reaching speed of over 300 km/h, the Bulgarian State Railways (BDZ) keep sliding downward because of the inability to adapt to modern conditions. They seem to stay at the beginning of the past century when steam engines dominated and when train stations were some of the most beautiful and remarkable buildings in every settlement.

Nowadays, rail transport retains its advantages, but they must be used to successfully compete with other types of transport. This means that the railways need to be reformed and keep pace with progress. However, this is not happening in BDZ, which, although financially supported by the state and implementing modernization projects financed by the European Union with hundreds of millions of euros keep losing both business and individual clients as they don’t meet requirements of today's consumers, even though railway transport remains the cheapest in the country.

Minister of Transport, Rosen Zhelyazkov, described the situation in BDZ as "lacking idea for development", which is probably one of the reasons three members of the Board of Directors, including the Chief Executive Officer Vladimir Vladimirov to file resignations a month ago. So far there are no new managers in their place, which can also be interpreted as a lack of vision for the future of the railways.

Against the backdrop of this management weakness, the crisis in BDZ continues and the company is plagued by lack of everything – money, passengers, freight, locomotives, cars,. Last year, the railways transported 21 million passengers (compared to 99 million passengers in the last year of Communism - 1989) and received a state subsidy of 114 million euros. The average train speed is 45 km/h. Yet, almost monthly there are accidents and even fires while conditions for passengers are often bad.

BDZ currently owes under a second bond issue in 2017 some EUR 52.5 million. The government decided in October that payments would be put off until December 30 next year. These days, it has become clear that the European Union would invest 293.4 million euros under the Cohesion Fund in more modern, faster and safer rail links connecting some of Bulgaria's largest cities with the Black Sea port of Burgas. This way, investments contribute to the construction of the high-speed rail route along the Orient/East-Med Corridor of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) linking Central and Southeast Europe. Authorities in the country have also decided to take part of the money from the long-delayed concession of Sofia Airport and use it for strengthening the BDZ.