When I went to Kumanovo in June of 2024 and found a railway station half complete, I must admit I did not think trains would run there any time soon. But this week I was proven wrong – the first part of the line that will eventually connect Skopje ion North Macedonia with Sofia in Bulgaria was indeed opened with some fanfare, with a ceremony next to the canopy I had photographed half a year earlier.

But there is a catch, and Railtech has covered it, quoting me.

Only the first stage – to Beljakovje – has been opened, and that will only have two or three trains a week running on it. Given Kumanovo in particular is commuter distance from Skopje there would be commuter potential for the line, and for that you’d need a dozen trains a day. And the real work is still to come – to complete the line to Sofia you need to cross hilly terrain between Beljakovce and the main regional centre, the town Kriva Palanka, and from there build a tunnel at least 3km in length to get to Gyushevo on the Bulgarian side. And while there is at least a line on the Bulgarian side, it needs massive investment to make it useable.

So we might be beyond the problem at one of Macedonia’s other borders – a phantom railway line with no trains – but there is a hell of a lot of work to do here still.

These days however my thoughts are more on a tunnel at the other end of Europe – the Channel Tunnel. One that very much does run, but has in its thirty years of existence never reached its potential. I wrote a piece for The i Paper about how any rival to Eurostar faces big hurdles to enter the market – see that as a kind of taster for the #CrossChannelRail project coming up this spring!