EUROPE: Yugoslavia Back on Track

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Oct 7 2010 (IPS) - For a while it looked like the start of a ride in a time machine. Serbian engineers, their caps bearing the emblems of the defunct Yugoslav Railways, cheered on the first train of the new Slovenian-Croatian-Serbian railway.

The ceremony on Monday, attended by transport ministers of all three nations, signalled the first joint venture in 20 years between countries that separated in the wars of the 1990s.

“This joint venture should bring economic benefits to each participant of at least 50 million euros annually,” Serbian infrastructure and transport minister Milutin Mrkonjic said at the ceremony. “We have synchronised police, customs and sanitary controls of all three countries (Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia), so there will be no more stalling at borders.

“This is an excellent beginning to mutual cooperation of ex-Yugoslavs, in their economic interest,” he told IPS.

The first train carried cargo, 700 tonnes of wood briquettes, originating from a production site in the central Serbian town Paracin. It moved past the border crossing with Croatia at Sid, the Croatian crossing Tovarnik into Slovenia, on to a border crossing with Italy at Sezana, and further to the Italian city Trieste.

The 700km journey takes 20 hours now, ten less than in the past month, thanks to integrated and simplified border and customs procedures.

“It is our intention to introduce this line, dubbed for now ‘the Alliance Cargo 10’ as competition for the so-called Pan-European Corridor 4,” Mrkonjic told IPS. “That one runs from Germany into Turkey via Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian tracks. Ours is a much shorter route that will make transport of goods from Germany to Istanbul in Turkey last at least 25 hours less, down from 60 to 35 — and thus effectively much cheaper.”

The once united Yugoslav Railways had more than 10,000 kilometres of tracks in the six republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. In 1920, the existing railway companies for this area came together when Yugoslavia was formed after World War I.

Their shared lives ended in 1991 with the break-up of former Yugoslavia, when each of the newly founded nations established railway companies of their own. The 1991-95 wars saw the devastation of some parts of the railways in northern Bosnia or eastern Croatia, and a cutting off of traffic until 2000.

With the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia that year and the lifting of international economic sanctions, a slow recovery of mutual connections began, but it is now that a joint venture has been launched.

“It is our common economic interest that led to the joint venture we’ve created, for the benefit of all our national economies,” Croatian minister for seas, transportation and infrastructure Danijel Mileta said at Batajnica. “For a start, the service will travel once a week to Italy, with contracts already signed for transport of 50,000 tons of goods from Serbia.

“This cargo transport will also release the pressure on our roads, which are being clogged with trucks that take this shortest way (through former Yugoslavia) to Western Europe, from Greece, Turkey or further east,” Mileta told IPS.

The seat of the company is in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, as Slovenia is the sole former Yugoslav nation that has joined the European Union (EU). The total length of Corridor 10 is 1,270 kilometres.

“Honestly, we all needed joint presentation and a common market,” Croatian official Zlatko Rogozar told IPS. “Railways of less than 400 kilometres are simply not profitable, and now we have three times that, and a joint company of potentially 25,000 carriages and 500 locomotives.”

So far, there are no plans to unite the railways of the three. The re- introduction of air traffic between former Yugoslav nations since 2000 and use of cars for distances up to 300km has limited interest in unification for passenger services.

“It’s too early to think about that, we are all focused on the profitable cargo business,” Vlacic said.

Last week, the Serbian state-owned railway company got a 100 million euros loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to upgrade its rail services towards Western Europe, renewal of 111 kilometres of poorly kept tracks along Corridor 10, and purchase of 15 new electric locomotives.

The signing of the contract last week marked the 126th anniversary of the establishment of Serbian Railways since it went into operation in 1884 with the first railway line linking Belgrade and southern city Nis.