Albania's shoddy new railway

In the Newsletter this week
Analysis: Albania's shoddy new railway
Bullshit Meter: Skopje commuter train service to start 1st September
Good week: Hungary gets a good transport minister
Bad week: Romania orders hydrogen trains
Elsewhere this week: The Guardian about Ryanair
Photo of the week: RVR EMUs in the Balkans
Calendar: Régiolis France-Germany trains launch Monday 4th May, maybe?

Newsletter 015, Friday 1st May 2026.
Subscriber-only newsletter, sent every Friday at 14:00 CET.

Albania's shoddy new railway

I have been travelling across the Western Balkans this week, and Tuesday and Wednesday I was in Albania - to present my railway work at College of Europe, Tirana, and check the ongoing efforts to build a new railway in the country.

It was a question from Prof Gentian Elezi at the College of Europe that brought my issues with Albania's new railway into focus. "In the 1980s as children in Albania," Elezi said, "we used to take the train. It was a collective thing, but it worked, and it got us to where we needed to go. But then came individualism and the car. Can we ever get Albanians back onto trains?"

It was a fair question, and one I could answer with a story from a few days earlier in Beograd, Serbia. "The opening of the Novi Sad - Beograd line has been a transformation," Matej Zakonjšek at Transport Community told me. "I know people who take the train every day from Novi Sad to work in Belgrade and return home the same day. It has changed how people think about commuting between the two cities."

The Subotica - Novi Sad - Beograd line, whatever the controversies with the Chinese financing and the tragedy at Novi Sad station, has been good enough to tempt people out of their cars. 45 minutes on a modern train, versus 90 minutes driving, is a no brainer. And while Beograd Centar (OpenRailwayMap) remains poorly connected, Novi Beograd (OpenRailwayMap) is developing into an interesting multimodal hub - and the fast trains stop there too.

So could the Tirana - Tirana Airport - Durrës line (OpenRailwayMap) have the same effect?

With about 45km between Albania's capital and its main port, and with the airport and plenty of smaller towns in between, density of population is obviously sufficient. And the traffic congestion on the motorway between Tirana and Durrës is legendary. To get just to the airport from central Tirana by bus took 50 minutes. The need is obvious.

The ability of the new railway to deliver is not so clear.

Honestly I have not seen a poorer new railway in Europe.

In its first phase the new line will run from Kashar, near the bus terminal in a far flung western suburb of Tirana, not anywhere near the city centre. So it will be a long bus ride to even get to the train station.

The line being built is initially only single track, and not electrified initially (although electrification might eventually happen). This is going to mean diesel trains, and a low capacity. To have gone to all the effort to rebuild the railway from scratch (the alignment is the one the old line used, but everything has been replaced), but to then build to such a low specification, is bewildering.

There is also a place just a few hundred metres from Kashar where the future line will cross the busy road to Kamez. This urgently needs some underpass or overpass, but there are no signs of one being constructed.

At a big event I attended in Sarajevo in June 2024, Albania's government promised an electrified line to the airport by the end of 2025. Any sort of completed line, let alone an electrified one, is a long way off still! Most of the track has been laid, but the stations in Kashar, the airport, and Durrës have scarcely advanced in the almost two years since I was last in Albania. The airport station is also poorly situated, a long walk south from the terminal past all the car hire centres.

Officially plans have been announced to once again build a station closer to the centre of Tirana. I cycled beside the old line all the way from Kashar into the city, and can confirm that - apart from one place where a new motorway has sliced through it (and place is forseen for a new railway bridge) - the whole alignment is still available for railway use. But unlike the section west of Kashar towards Durrës, absolutely no work has even begun on this inner-Tirana section.

And as if that were all not enough, the only thing I found with any charm to it on my last visit to Durrës - the old railway station hall - has now been demolished.

Yet all of that did not prevent Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama talking this week about how high speed trains will in the future connect Albania with Kosovo (warning: link to Instagram).

Rama, really, the gap between your rhetoric and the railway you are trying to build within Albania is not a gap but more of a chasm. Until you build something decent between Tirana and Durrës, why should we believe a further word you say?

Bullshit Meter: Skopje commuter train service to start 1st September

Skopje is going to get a commuter rail service! This year! The tracks are being repaired. That bit - from Minister of Transport Aleksandar Nikoloski - might be true. The problem is that to run a train service you, well, need trains. And the state of the rolling stock maintenance in North Macedonia has been dreadful for years. They have not even been able to keep the Chinese built EMUs and DMUs running, meaning that some lines like Skopje - Tabanovce have no trains at all simply due to a lack of rolling stock. So I do not believe these commuter trains will start this year. Or not reliably anyway!

All previous Bullshit Meter posts can be found here.

Good week: Hungary gets a good transport minister

Fresh from his landslide election victory, Péter Magyar has started to assemble his government, and the new Minister of Transport will be Dávid Vitézy. I have encountered him a few times over the years, and he is a clever and knowledgeable person. His role helping form BKK, the Budapest public transport authority, proves his ability, and his initial statements - about urgently needing fix issues with MÁV, the state owned railway company, are reassuring. It's good a solid expert has been appointed to the job!

Bad week: Romania orders hydrogen trains

We know from the problems in Germany that hydrogen trains are not a good idea - securing supplies of green hydrogen is complex, and even if you can solve that the reliability of the trains is poor so far. And if you can solve that a hydrogen train is likely more expensive to operate than a regular electric or a battery electric one.

So what has Romania - a cash strapped railway - gone and done? Ordered 12 hydrogen trains from Siemens. The trains are to be deployed on the 100km route Bucuresti - Pitești apparently, a route you could easily do with a battery train and one fast charger at the Pitești end. Or - better still - electrified it.

More widely, investing in this, rather than focusing everything in the renovation of Romania's main corridors strikes me as wrong from the start. Honestly I could more easily tolerate a few more years of diesel to Pitești than I can the poor state of many of the mainlines!

Elsewhere this week: The Guardian about Ryanair

Not quite my normal topic, but I am quoted in The Guardian this week about why people should take the train to Berlin after Ryanair decided to close its base there.

Photo of the week: RVR EMUs in the Balkans

The JŽ class 412/416 were EMUs built in Rīga, ordered in the 1980s. Some of them - in various states of disrepair - still run today in Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. Here are a few I happened to encounter this week!

Calendar: Régiolis France-Germany trains launch Monday 4th May, maybe?

Finally, maybe, the new cross border Régiolis trains might finally enter into service on Monday 4th May, at least if this post on Bluesky is to be believed. This will be the beginning of the end of a long saga, if it happens!

I happen to be passing Strasbourg that day, en route to Luxembourg, so will go and see if I can finally ride one. I will take the 19:22 Strasbourg - Offenburg, and the 20:05 Offenburg - Strasbourg, both of which are scheduled to be Régiolis.

If you would like to stay up to date with what I am doing, there are public calendars to which you can subscribe: Jon Worth - Speeches and Events ICS | Jon Worth - Travel ICS | Jon Worth - Other Rail Dates ICS And if you'd like me to speak at an event or run a workshop, contact me about that.

Photo Rights

All photos in this edition are taken by Jon Worth, except Photo of David Vitézy (2021), David Nyitrai, 10 February 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0 - Wikimedia Commons. Bullshit Meter images always have photo rights listed directly on the image.