Slovenia - Croatia #CrossBorderRail news
đź‘Ž Direct DivaÄŤa - Pula trains will end (but there was just 1x a day, now a change in Buzet will be needed)
đź‘Ť SĹ˝ will run modern EMUs Ljubljana - Rijeka - definitely better than the old knackered carriages
🤔 There's talk of some more connections in Dobova, but no details on how
@jon The first one's very weird - I get that they'll want to replace the existing DMUs but SĹ˝'s diesel FLIRTs are also certified for Croatia so they should be usable...
As for the LJ-Rijeka trains, very good step for accessibility (now please work on upgrading stations on the Croatian side - LJ is inaccessible too but likely not for long), huge downgrade in comfort - the old UIC coaches are very very old but so comfy. Wish Slovenia would order some replacements instead of ordering essentially a single type of train for literally everything. I fear the day the Zagreb-LJ-Villach ECs get turned into FLIRTs too...
@samuele963 Surely the EC will eventually become a Railjet / Comfortjet type of train? SĹ˝ is ordering new electric locomotives.
Re Pula - I don’t know why SŽ can’t run the whole way, but the track is so very slow - simply an economic decision?
@jon If it happens I'd - oddly enough - expect it to be from ÖBB rather than SŽ or HŽPP, since they currently provide the loco on the Slovenian and Austrian parts of the ECs and they could shuffle carriages/trainsets between countries more easily than the Slovenians or Croatians. The Mimara already used to use ÖBB coaches entirely when it went all the way to Frankfurt so it's not all that unlikely
I'm sceptical of the split of the Pula train being for economical reasons - presumably the current train is already operated jointly by SŽ and HŽPP so splitting it wouldn't save much money; more likely that this is somehow related to the new Koncar battery units that are about to enter service (battery chargers are already being installed). Perhaps they wanna completely de-dieselify that route for passenger ops and of course the battery trains aren't certified for Slovenia, necessitating the split
@jon Of course there's also the question of the MV/IC Citadella to Budapest, currently operated with two SĹ˝ carriage and a MAV IC+ one; perhaps the former will simply be replaced by more MAV coaches. That'd certainly be the simplest solution
And the Emona will be interesting, but at least for IT/SI/AT compatibility a Railjet-based solution wouldn't be difficult to implement, just need to get Slovenian certification
@samuele963 Not long time ago Railjet was in Slovenia making some test runs. Might be part of certifications process.
Jon Worth
samuele963
Aleš Časar
Matthew Fullerton