Pages tagged: Croatia

This past week has seen new direct overnight services on three key routes, one a French domestic service and the other two both international routes. We'll take a closer look at the offer which brings new night trains to Nice, Split and Amsterdam.

Railjets bring Europe together. Every day, they set off from Zürich for distant Bratislava and Budapest, the latter a journey of over a thousand kilometres. Each route takes in four countries (including tiny Liechtenstein). And now there is a new service linking Graz and Berlin.

Deutsche Bahn now runs an overnight bus service from eastern Slavonia (in Croatia) and Zagreb to southern Germany. Border controls on the Austrian-German frontier mean that no long-distance trains are running from Salzburg into Bavaria. So, with no overnight train from Zagreb to Munich, DB is nudging travellers onto the bus instead.

Croatia is a country with relatively low levels of car ownership (at least compared with many European countries), and a decent rail network. The country is gearing up to join the European Union (EU) next year, and the EU is pressing Croatia to implement structural reforms in inefficient state-owned industries. And running trains on that network might be deemed a worthwhile public service. But Croatia has deferred so totally to the economic pieties dictated by the IMF and the EU that it is now scrapping many train services.

Russian Railways (RZD) this week launches new direct seasonal through carriages from Moscow to Split on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. The inaugural run left Moscow's Kiyevskaya station just after 10 pm last evening. The entire journey to Split takes 62 hours, but with an interesting interlude in Budapest along the way.