Šargan Eight

Listen first. Somewhere below you, a whistle carries across the valley, thin and high, then fades into the pines. The air smells of coal smoke and wet grass. Under your feet the wooden platform boards give slightly, and the rails beside them are close together. They are much closer than on any mainline you know. This is the Šargan Eight, a narrow-gauge mountain railway that climbs the slopes above Mokra Gora, close to the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The name tells you the shape. Seen from above, the track draws a rough figure eight across the mountainside. It crosses over itself, doubles back, and loops around the valley. The engineers chose this path for one reason. The mountain was too steep for a train to climb directly. So they made the line longer. Each extra curve and loop let the train gain height slowly, at a gradient a small locomotive could manage.

The gauge here is narrow, about seventy-six centimetres between the rails. In this part of the Balkans it is often called the Bosnian gauge. A network of these small railways once spread across Bosnia and into western Serbia. It started in the late nineteenth century, when the region was under Austro-Hungarian rule. Narrow track was cheaper to build. It could bend tightly around hillsides, and it needed smaller tunnels and lighter bridges. In country like this, those savings decided whether a railway was possible at all.

The Šargan section was the missing link. For years, the narrow-gauge lines from Bosnia and from Serbia stopped on either side of this mountain. The connection over Šargan was completed in the 1920s. It finally joined the route between Belgrade and Sarajevo, by way of Užice and Višegrad. For about half a century, passengers and freight crossed these slopes in small carriages. Timber, livestock, and families visiting relatives all moved along this track.

Then the age of narrow gauge ended. New roads and standard-gauge railways made these slow lines look old-fashioned. The route was closed in 1974, and much of the track was lifted. Here is something many visitors do not know. For around twenty years the figure eight was almost gone. Grass covered the trackbed. The tunnels stood empty, and the stations fell quiet. Only the shape cut into the hillside showed where the trains once ran.

Restoration began in the late 1990s. Local enthusiasts and railway workers rebuilt the line section by section. They relaid the rails, repaired the tunnels, and brought old steam engines and wooden carriages back into service. Within a few years the train ran again between Mokra Gora and Šargan Vitasi, the station high on the mountain. The rebuilt line covers roughly fifteen kilometres. The distance in a straight line is far shorter. That gap is the whole secret of the figure eight.

As the train leaves Mokra Gora, watch the valley floor. Within minutes the station is below you, then behind you, then suddenly beside you again on another level. The route passes through about twenty-two tunnels. Some are so short that the carriage goes dark for only a breath. Others last long enough for the smoke to drift in through open windows. Children often shout in the darkness. Adults usually do the same, though more quietly.

The bridges add a second kind of drama. Several stone and steel structures carry the track across ravines. From one bridge you can sometimes look down and see the track you travelled on a few minutes earlier. This is the clearest moment to understand the design. The train is not climbing a mountain so much as winding around it. The landscape turns slowly, like a map that someone keeps rotating in your hands.

The train stops at small stations along the way, including Jatare and Golubići. The stops give passengers time to step down, stretch, and take photographs. Look at the station buildings. They are modest, practical structures, built for mountain weather, with deep roofs and simple walls. Around them the forest comes close. In summer you may hear cowbells from nearby pastures. In autumn the beech trees turn copper and gold against the dark green of the pines.

The line also has a life in cinema. The Serbian director Emir Kusturica filmed parts of his 2004 film Life Is a Miracle on this railway. The story follows a railway engineer in the Bosnian war, and the mountain line plays a central role. Kusturica also built a small wooden village on the nearby hill of Mećavnik. Locals call it Drvengrad, which simply means wooden town. Many visitors combine the two in one day.

Now think about the city name you came with: Višegrad. The old narrow-gauge route once continued down from these mountains, across what is now the border, to Višegrad on the Drina River. That town is known for its sixteenth-century Ottoman stone bridge. The bridge became the subject of Ivo Andrić's novel The Bridge on the Drina. Andrić later received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In recent years, work has brought rail service back along the Bosnian side toward Višegrad as well.

So the Šargan Eight is more than a pleasure ride. It is one surviving piece of a longer story. This was a line that tied mountain villages to river towns, and Serbia to Bosnia. It survived empires and a world war. It almost disappeared, and then it was rebuilt by people who remembered it. When the whistle sounds across the valley, it is partly a tourist attraction. It is also a sound that people here once heard every day.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment. Look up at the hillside and try to trace the line with your eyes. Find a tunnel mouth, then a curve, then the next level of track above it. Listen for the engine working hard on the slope. Notice the smell of smoke in your clothes and the grit on the platform. When you walk away, the figure eight will still be there in the hillside, a shape drawn by people who refused to go straight up.