Lines in a Landscape

20 years ago on the Belgrade to Bar Railway

Twenty years ago today, I bought a ticket to travel the following day, from the main station in Belgrade to Kolašin in northern Montenegro. It would be my first trip on part of the Belgrade to Bar railway.

A train ticket and reservation from 2004, for a journey from Belgrade to Kolašin

In 2004 Serbia and Montenegro was still notionally unified, but operated in many respects as two separate countries. As you can see, tickets were still issued in the name of "Jugoslovenské železnice" (Yugoslav Railways), but that wouldn't last much longer. The reservation slip shows a price of 15 million dinars: it must have been printed many years before, in the era of hyperinflation. By the time of my visit the redenominated dinar had returned to a more sensible value, and old 500 million dinar notes were sold as souvenirs to the relatively few tourists who visited Belgrade.

I had been looking forward to the famous scenery along the line, but the further south we travelled, the worse the weather got. By the time we reached Montenegro, nothing at all was visible through the mist and rain. Still, it was an enjoyable trip thanks to the friendly passengers sharing my compartment, who generously shared their provisions of Serbian-manufactured Jaffa cakes.

I took some further short trips on the Montenegrin section of the line over the following days, but the weather didn't improve much, so I ended up with an underwhelming set of photos that don't do the route justice.

Thoughts on timetables

This photo of the Belgrade departures timetable was taken in autumn 2006, but the Belgrade to Bar schedule hadn't changed much since my earlier visit. By this time Serbia and Montenegro had definitively separated, and the Belgrade to Bar route had become an international journey, complete with border checkpoints. Departures timetable for Belgrade train station 2005-2006, on the traditional yellow background, showing a wide selection of international trains.

At this time there were two daytime and two overnight trains between Belgrade and Bar throughout the year, and two more slow trains to Bijelo Polje in northern Montenegro. I believe that in 2024 there is just one year-round night train, plus one day train in summer.

It is not just the Belgrade to Bar route that has seen a drastic decline in frequency in the intervening years. In 2006 there was still a sense that Belgrade's main station was a hub of international rail travel in Central and Southeast Europe. Now the grand old station itself is closed, and most of the international connections have disappeared. I don't want to romanticize that period: many of those trains were old and shabby, and long delays were common. But if you had the time and patience, just look at the places you could go on a direct train:

And on top of those direct trains, there were official connections to Istanbul, Kiev, Moscow and Banja Luka.

Railway commentator Jon Worth has been writing for many years about deficiencies in Europe's international train network. In summer 2024 he will be be travelling around Southeast Europe. I look forward to his comments on the current state of the Belgrade-Bar line, and on international connections (or the lack of them) in the Balkans generally.

Published 2024-04-05