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  I HAD sentimentally imagined that the Belgrade-Sarajevo train would prove a rich source of colour and interviews. No such luck. The journey turned out to be long and boring. But that is the thing about journalism. The only way to find out if your expectations are right is to get out there and check for yourself. In this case mine were way off, but that did not mean there was no story. It just meant it was a different one.

  Train 451 leaves Belgrade’s tatty station every morning at 8.15. The design of the old Yugoslav railway network means that the route to Sarajevo is meandering: the train travels first to Vinkovci, in eastern Slavonia, Croatia, before heading south to Bosnia. The link was cut at the beginning of the Yugoslav wars in 1991—Vinkovci was a front-line town and was shelled by the Serbs—and not re-established in December 2009.

  The daily flight between Belgrade and Sarajevo takes 45 minutes to cover the 200-odd kilometres; it would be quicker in a plane that was not propellor-powered. The bus takes about six hours, a car less (with the added bonus that the road route traverses the beautiful Drina valley). But by train you arrive in Sarajevo at 5:35pm, almost nine and a half hours after departing Belgrade. That’s roughly the time of a flight between London to Beijing—which is why hardly anyone takes this train.

  Actually, that is not fair. People do take it, but for local trips, hopping on and off along the way. I asked a Croat who embarked in central Bosnia why he was travelling by train rather than bus, hoping he might have something interesting to say. He replied that he had a back problem and that on the train he had more space.

  Much of the track and rolling stock feel like they belong to a past era. But the real reason for the sluggishness has to do with borders and bureaucracy. Here’s how it works. A couple of hours after leaving Belgrade you get to the town of Sremska Mitrovica, where three things happen. First, Serbian police check your passport and identity card. Second, Serbian customs officials examine the train. Third, Serbian railwaymen uncouple the Serbian locomotive so that their Croatian counterparts can replace it with their own, in order to haul the train’s two miserable carriages over the border into Croatia.

  Seven minutes later the train stops in Tovarnik, where Croatian police get on to check passports and identity cards again, with Croatian customs officers following behind. An hour later, next to the border with the Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb bit of Bosnia, Croatian police and customs officers repeat their checks, and Croatian railwaymen uncouple their locomotive and one from the RS is shunted up to replace it. The train trundles over the Sava river into the RS and Bosnia.

  By now the pattern has become familiar. A few minutes later it is the turn of Bosnian police and customs officers to check passengers and the train. Two hours later we pull into Doboj, in the Bosniak-Croat Federation part of Bosnia. There can be no question of an RS locomotive taking this train to Sarajevo, so it is duly uncoupled and one from Federation Railways shunted into place. Finally, three hours later, the train draws into Sarajevo’s cavernous, utterly empty station.

  The railway tells a story about regional co-operation in the former Yugoslavia. It exists, it works, but my goodness it could work a lot better. Last September I wrote that the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had founded a new cargo company to speed up the transportation of cargo along the railway from Slovenia through to Istanbul. Infrastructure was not the problem, I was told. It was the constant stopping and starting, which slowed the trains so much that they became economically unviable.

  I don’t know how long will it be before all of the countries of the former Yugoslavia belong to the European Union and are hence reunited as an economic space. But I do know that it might pay for someone to realise that if bureaucratic barriers can be brought down in order to speed up trade, business and travel, even if people are still not able to travel as fast as they deserve to in Europe in 2011, at least they would be able to travel like it was 1991.

  http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/04/rail_travel_ex-yugoslavia

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