Abstract
Railway infrastructures and services in the countries of former Yugoslavia have been in a downward spiral since the early 1990s. There have been scattered investments to lift services up to appealing levels after the war, but a continuous downward trend persists in all important performance indicators. After war-attributed abandonment, numerous lines lost services permanently, numbers of services dwindled, especially across borders, and service speeds decreased. This research takes Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina specifically as survey objects. It aims to identify the barriers in these two countries that withheld passenger rail from a positive development as in other European countries during the same period. For this purpose we carried out 11 interviews with stakeholders in various railway-related institutions. The transcripts are analysed qualitatively with thematic analysis to gain an overview of organisational and institutional barriers for development of railways. This is followed by a cause-effect analysis with Causal Loop Diagramming. The result: ad-hoc decision-making is clearly connected to the insignificance of railways. As immediate measures to counter the downward spiral by means of strategic long term planning, we identify (1) service benchmarking, (2) a clear vision for improvement of service quality, and (3) empowerment of ministries in a long term.
Highlights
South-East Europe in general and former Yugoslavia in particular is a diverse, heterogeneous and complex transnational area, made up of a broad mix of countries
The less-used passenger transport service adds to the bad image of the railway in Croatia and Republika Srpska
In the research presented in this paper, in order to understand socio-political barriers to improve passenger railway services in the region, we carried out extensive stakeholder interviews in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to identify the barriers for improvement of railways
Summary
South-East Europe in general and former Yugoslavia in particular is a diverse, heterogeneous and complex transnational area, made up of a broad mix of countries. The emergence of new countries in the 1990s and with it the establishment of new national borders has changed the patterns of political, economic, social and cultural relationships in the last three decades, which had a strong impact on railways [1]. Former Yugoslavia includes the following countries in alphabetical order: Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Croatia (HR), Northern Macedonia (MK), Montenegro (MNG), Serbia (SRB), and Slovenia (SLO). The region underwent name changes, from SouthEast Europe until the time of the Ottoman Empire and after the Second World War, later this area has been called The Balkans [2]. Appendix 1 enumerates key railway statistic data of both countries
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