Kosovo - Wartime Locomotive Graveyard

Going back to the end of November 2019, And I find myself in the salubrious surroundings of a ‘Railway Graveyard’, in a suburb of Pristina, Kosovo. Granted, not your average holiday destination… but I don’t really do average. A very unusual place to visit, but I couldn’t miss this when in the Country, and as is usual on these types of things, it didn’t come without it’s challenges…

The Kosovo War was an armed conflict in Kosovo that started 28 February 1998 and lasted until 11 June 1999. It was fought by the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which controlled Kosovo before the war, and the Kosovo Albanian rebel group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. (Source: Wiki)

Wartime Markings

Due to most of the Railway Rolling Stock being impounded or destroyed by the Serbs durng the war, Kosovo ended up with numerous secondhand Locomotives and Coaches from other Railways in Europe, noteably 4 Nohab Loco’s from Norway, and Passenger Cars from Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Norweigan built, donated by Swedish Railways.

A lot of these now lie broken and will never run again, parts obviously being the main issue and lack of staff to keep a full maintenance regime going, lot’s of markings from the War still remian on the loco’s, The NATO symbol and KFOR (KFOR was a NATO-led international peacekeeping force) can be seen on numerous loco’s in these images.

Now as you would imagine this is still quite a sensitive Country and walking around a live railway installation with a camera and tripod isn’t the greatest idea but I’d already decided that it was worth a look and this would maybe the only time I would get to do it (see also earlier blog post on Sarajevo). I’d done my research before travelling and I had a pretty good idea of where it was, after getting a taxi out of town and being dropped off in the middle of a random housing estate we quickly found the railway lines and worked out where everything was, the easiest route to it seemed to be by just folowing the railway lines, whilst you could never do in Britain it isn’t a problem at all over here as every man and his dog just walks along the lines to get where they are going. Once at the Railway Depot the intention was to go and ask someone if it was OK if we took some pictures, explain we were from the UK and no threat to anyone, problem was there wasn’t a soul in any building, there was a loco running in one of the sheds but nobody about at all apart from one guy who appeared to be fixing a roof.

Luckily he spoke a little English and we managed to find out he didn’t actually work on the Railway and was just doing some odd jobs about the place, with this in mind I decided to just go and find the scrapyard area and get busy, I wasn’t getting this far and giving up on it.

A good hour or so was had photographing the old scrap Loco’s and exploring the lines of ex Yugoslavian vehicles, lots of which were adorned with all the war markings, we decided to head over to another shed where there appeared to be even more stuff hidden away, as we did a scruffy looking man just appeared out of nowhere and beckoned us to come over, he didn’t speak of word of English but the general jist of it was that we definitely shouldn’t be there and needed to leave immediately. My mate was more than willing to just leave but I still hadn’t finished and wanted to see the other bits so I got the roof repair guy to help us translate with this other ‘Security’ guy. To cut a long story short he was saying we needed permission off the Railways to be there and would need to leave so I said to the roof man here show him this, and handed him a railway pass for the neighbouring Country of Macedonia, he looked at it for a few moments, (obviously no idea what it was apart from the distinct railway logo stamped on it) and then declared that he was sorry he had asked us to leave and that we were now welcome to stay, furthermore he would show us around the place!! If you don’t try you don’t get….! another 30 mins or so were spent looking around different areas, and getting pics before we bid our new friend a good day and walked off back down the line to the deserted and seemingly forgotten station (pics below) to catch one of the only trains of the day back into Pristina.

Well hidden away, Ex Swedish Railways, this was thought to have been scrapped many years ago

Pre war ‘Yugoslavian Railways’ logo

Rows of scrappers

NOHAB, Norwegian built Loco’s

Original Builders plate from Canada,1980

Often the only way to get onto the next line was to climb through gaps like these.

Long abandoned ex Yugoslavian Diesels

Stripped for parts.

Forlorn

Journeys end.

Dumped.

Rows

Crude numbering

Head of the line.

Forgotten Giants

Dumped NOHAB

More broken stock.

NATO & KFOR logo’s

Old ‘Yugoslavian Railways’ plate.

Old advert at the deserted station

Arrivals and Departures - none.

The long wait.

All images ©PeteRowbottom2019 - not be used or reproduced without permission.

Abandoned 1984 Winter Olympics Bobsleigh track, Sarajevo, Bosnia

In 2015 myself and a mate of mine traveled to Slovenia to watch England play Slovenia in an international football match (well he did, I was there for the travel mainly), to make things more interesting we flew to Split in Croatia, and from there made our way into Bosnia, before heading from there to Zagreb and across to Ljubljana. Part of the trip was one place I was really looking forward to visiting, Sarajevo. A city that has seen so much bloodshed, destruction, and unbelievable atrocity as recently as 1996, when the siege finally ended.

Sarajevo is a great city, steeped in history and a real mix of cultures, making for a great visit. While we were there we learned that the sites of the 1984 Winter Olympics were still in place and had been left abandoned on Trebević mountain overlooking the city, this for me was something that really flicked my switch and simply had to go and see before we left, so the next day we set off to try and get there.

Numerous taxi’s point blank refused to take us there, we didn’t know why… eventually we found one guy who agreed and we set off, half way up into the mountains he stopped and removed the ‘taxi’ sign off the roof, saying “no taxis here” or words to that effect, he eventually dropped us off in a small empty car park, overlooked by what appeared to be a completely burnt out hotel complex, we paid him, and before he made his rather swift exit, he pointed us toward a small road heading into the forest.

The weather was great, we were high up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t another soul around, as we walked down the track signs started to appear on trees, we couldn’t read any of them, they appeared to be warnings and we just presumed they were to do with forest fires… shortly afterwards we saw the Olympic rings painted onto the road and looking up we could see the first curve of the abandoned bobsleigh track above us.

First sight of the track

Climbing up onto it wasn’t hard and were soon exploring away, we walked to the very top where the old viewing stands were still in place, albeit covered in moss and trees, from there we made our way down the 30 year old concrete track, along the way there were strange ‘holes’ in the high walls of the track, obviously man made but for what purpose we didn’t know, (we would find out a day later)

Overgrown track walls

At this point I must stress that we really had not researched this outing and it was a pretty much spur of the moment decision to do the night before, looking back it was incredibly stupid given what had happened here.. as we neared the bottom of the track we realised that we were still really high into the mountains, the city just a distant feature a good way away, we somehow thought the track would just lead us right back to the city… at the bottom of the track there was the finish line bridge with all the old lettering on it, we took turns at climbing up onto it, again amazed that there was nobody around… amazed that was until we walked just a little further on to the physical end to the track, where we found a concrete pill box and absolutely loads of yellow tape everywhere with the wording ‘POZOR / MINES’, yes, we were in the middle of an uncleared minefield, the Serbs had land mined the area before they left .

Mine warnings

As you can imagine this revelation put a different stint on the visit, we were still miles out of the City and no concrete track to take us to our destination, instead there was just an old vehicle track heading downwards with bombed out houses either side, all riddled with bullet holes.. as far as I could see it there were 2 options, walk back up the track and somehow try to call another taxi (if there was signal and we could somehow find a number) or we just cracked on and walked down the vehicle track, walking in where vehicles had been and not in the grassy central area. We chose the latter option as there was certainly no guarantee anyone would come for us given the reluctance of most drivers to actually take us up there in the first place. As we made our way down I was taking pictures of the buildings in a real war torn state, there were some great images to be had but there was no way we could even consider leaving the track we were on so everything had to be shot from a distance, my mate seemed quite amazed I wanted to still take photographs, my reasoning being that if we got blown up it wouldn’t matter anyway, and if we got out OK then I would have the images.

To cut a long story a little shorter after an hour or more we eventually came into a better stretch of road and shortly afterwards some inhabited houses which was a great relief, a guy washing his carpets in the street spoke to us and after realising we were English was really friendly and offered us a drink, we thanked him but we just wanted to get out of there and pressed onward to the city.

Heading back down to the City

Eating our lunch of Kofta kebabs in the city a while later was a great moment and a time to reflect on something that could easily have gone a different way, I think we both learned a lot that day. We later found out that the holes in the walls of the track were made by snipers, used to pick off unsuspecting members of the public, trapped by the siege, just horrific.

Locals look on at the war torn buildings

Travelling light, all images from this trip were shot handheld on the mirror-less Fuji X100S with wide angle adaptor, and LEE 100 x 150 mm filters.

A set of images from the trip can be seen in the gallery on the right hand side of the blog page.