Narrow-gauge railway Šabac – Banja Koviljača
| Šabac – Banja Koviljača | |
|---|---|
| Gauge : | 760 mm ( Bosnian gauge ) |
The narrow-gauge railway from Šabac to Banja Koviljača was a railway line with Bosnian gauge (760 mm) in the west of Serbia .
history
A railway law passed by the Kingdom of Serbia in December 1898 , which aimed to open up the country by rail, also contained proposals for a total of nine narrow-gauge lines. These should be designed uniformly with a track width of 760 mm in order to enable a possible connection with the extensive route network of the same track width established by Austria-Hungary in Bosnia-Herzegovina . By the outbreak of the First Balkan War in 1912, six lines could be realized, the railway from Šabac to Banja Koviljača in 1910. It was operated as a district railway by the local administration and was thus one of two narrow-gauge railways in Serbia that were organized in this way.
Banja Koviljača was an important health resort in the Serbian kingdom . As a feeder to the spa, the railway was also equipped with a comfortable fleet of cars, including saloon cars for members of the royal family. In terms of freight transport, the railway line was used in particular to remove wood from the mountainous border region. The approx. 60 km long route ran not far from the Drina and also touched the market town of Loznica , which was important for the time and which was intended as the end point in the original project from 1898.
Several plans to expand the rail network drawn up after the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in the 1920s and 1930s provided for extensive construction of new standard gauge lines as well as extensions of the narrow-gauge network. The district railway was to be extended from Loznica via Zvornik to Tuzla , which would have established a connection with the narrow-gauge railways in Bosnia-Herzegovina. A concept from 1927 also envisaged a connection from Šabac to Obrenovac as part of a narrow-gauge mainline from Belgrade to northern Bosnia. The consequences of the global economic crisis of the 1920s, which made financing from international donors impossible, as well as nationalist tendencies within Yugoslavia delayed the expansion of the railway until the attack by the German armed forces finally halted all development in 1941 .
The reconstruction of Yugoslavia after the Second World War envisaged a number of new rail projects in addition to the repair of the route network, essentially projects that were planned before the war. The district railway was replaced in 1950 by an approx. 80 km long standard gauge line from Šabac to Zvornik. For this project, the narrow-gauge line served as a construction and transport carrier from 1948 to 1950.
As a result of the historical vicissitudes, locomotives of very different origins were used, including machines from German and Hungarian reparations . Originally, the new standard-gauge connection was to be carried over the Drina and on through the Bosnian mountains to Tuzla, so that the project that had been worked out before the war was now to be implemented in standard-gauge. The planning and surveying work had already been carried out, but the project was not completed for financial reasons and because other projects were prioritized. The railway therefore ends on the Serbian side of the Drina in a train station that was later named Mali Zvornik , now a small town with around 5000 inhabitants. Not far from this place there are extensive bunkers in which the last Yugoslav king Peter II hid from the advancing German troops in April 1941 until he fled into exile.
Currently, the route from Šabac to Mali Zvornik is only operated in freight traffic. Since the 1980s, a line branches off north of Zvornik via Karakaj to Tuzla.
literature
- Keith Chester: The Narrow Gauge Railways of Bosnia-Hercegovina , Stenvall Verlag, 2006, ISBN 91-7266-166-6
- Zoran Veresić: Steam in Serbia 1882–2007 , Royal Railway Society of Serbia, Belgrade, 2007
