Launched with some fanfare in the summer of 2024 (see The Times and Kurier that covered it for example), the “Trieste” – Rijeka international train service is no more.
The train will not run in 2025, and there is no known date for the resumption of the route.
This was confirmed to me today by email by CEI, secretariat of the SUSTANCE EU Interreg project that had financed the service last year. Officially the reason is that there are works on the line, and on much of Slovenia’s railway network in the coming years, and hence the route is suspended. This strikes me as a barely plausible reason, as the two daily Ljubljana – Rijeka trains are listed in timetables as running normally all summer this year, as are trains to Sežana and the Italian border at Villa Opicina.
The problems as I see it stem from faults from the outset.
This train – spun as a Trieste – Rijeka service – was not that. It started in Villa Opicina, which is on the hill above Trieste, because the Slovenske Železnice EMU used for the service (pictured at Rijeka) is not approved to run in Italy, so could not serve Trieste Centrale. Villa Opicina station is poorly situated for Villa Opicina, let alone for Trieste! Second, the train ran once a day in each direction, with the departure heading south in the early morning, meaning it was next to impossible to connect onto it from anywhere in either Italy or Slovenia. Third, the ticketing for the train was a mess, with online tickets only being partially available.
If you want to make a service like this work – and I see no reason why it could not work! – then it would need to be at least twice a day in each direction (morning and evening), and serve the stations passengers would actually want to use, and timetabled to allow connections with other services as well.
And I fear we are going to see a repeat of this sorry Villa Opicina – Rijeka story. This year while Gorizia and Nova Gorica are European Capital of Culture there is a train between them, but only on weekends. But once that project is done, is such a thin service going to survive into 2026? I fear not.
