Halfway down the Danube

Belgrade to Timisoara

Last week I took the train from Belgrade to Timisoara.

Belgrade is a city of more than a million people; it's the former capital of Yugoslavia, and still the capital of Serbia and Montenegro. Timisoara is the largest city in western Romania, about half a million people.

Timisoara is the nearest large city to Belgrade, and vice versa. The two cities are just 175 kilometers apart... about 110 miles, for Americans.

The train ride takes five hours and fifteen minutes.

It's not that it's a local train. It makes exactly two stops (Pancevo and Vrsac, if you must know).

It's not the terrain. Flat as a pancake, all the way. It's the Banat, which is sort of like the Iowa of the Balkans.

It's not the border. The border takes an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Annoying, but that still leaves something like four hours to cover 170 km. You could do that on a bicycle.

So why?

Well, part of the reason seems to be that the Serbian train system is hurting. It got messed up badly by the breakup of Yugoslavia, and then badly damaged by the NATO bombing. Apparently there are exactly two (2) locomotives available on the Belgrade - Vrsac line. One pulls passengers, the other freight.

Okay; but that can't be the whole story. The NATO bombing was five and a half years ago, and most of the damage has been repaired. Locomotives are not that expensive.

I really don't know the answer. But it does make for an interesting ride.

Coming out of Belgrade is the nice part. The train backs out of the station, waits a few minutes for switches to be thrown, then chugs slowly out of the yards and along the Sava river. You go under all the bridges. Past the Sava docks and the floating restaurants. Around to the confluence with the Danube, under the shadow of Kalamegdan hill and the old Turkish fortress. You leave in late afternoon, so the sun is setting on the other side of the river. Finally you go slowly over the big railroad bridge north of town. Pop open your window and you can stare 20 meters down into the brown water of the Danube. It's nice.

After that, though... well, it gets long. You crawl into Pancevo. Stop for no apparent reason. Move another kilometer or two. Stop again. Crawl forward to the station. Stop; wait for twenty minutes or more, while perhaps a dozen people get on and off. By this time over an hour has passed. Darkness is falling, but you can still see the lights of Belgrade just a few miles to the south.

Eventually you leave Pancevo and proceed, very slowly, to Vrsac. Maybe 100 km? That's another hour and a half.

-- Vrshac is actually a very nice small city. (It's pronounced VUR-shots, by the way. If you can trill the "r" just a little, you've got it.) Completely neglected; nobody ever seems to go there. But it's got one of those Austro-Hungarian town centers with the nice big plaza surrounded by churches and nice architecture. Also a pedestrian mall, with some decent-looking shops. A war memorial that was pretty obviously originally dedicated to the Hungarian dead of WWI, but now has a big blank spot at the base.

Vrsac sits under a mountain that's actually the farthest south-west corner of the Carpathians, where a spur juts out from the mass of the mountain range to poke a few miles into the Banat. Very dramatic, and I understand there are some fantastic views from the top. Just approaching on the train, it's something to see: a single lonely mountain rising majestically from the plain, with the town curled around its base.

But you can't visit Vrsac by train. Oh, you can, but it's not a good idea. For one thing, there are only two passenger trains per day -- the one I was on, and another one coming back around 6 in the morning. For another, the train station is inexplicably located, not in the center of town, but nearly two miles outside of it. Down a bleak road lined with closed factories that's not lit very well at night. Go figure.

So, the train sits at Vrsac for another half hour or so. And then it takes off north across the Banat. And it actually starts to pick up some speed. 40 miles per hour! 45! Zooming through the night, the dark plains flowing past outside your window...

...and then you reach the border, and get to sit for another hour or more while they check your papers.

The train leaves Belgrade at 3:45 in the afternoon. When you do eventually arrive in Timisoara -- again, just over 100 miles away -- it's 10:00 pm: five hours and fifteen minutes of travel, plus an hour of time difference.

Ah, well. One day they'll get a proper train, and the trip will take just two hours or so. But until then, it's still a trip worth making. Just bring a good book or a good friend, and a pack some sandwiches.

Posted by douglas at November 23, 2004 03:00 PM