A Fast Train from Bitola to Skopje Airport in 80 Minutes - For Now, Only in a Draft Plan to 2040

From Bitola to Skopje airport in 80 minutes - by train. That is the vision written into the Draft Spatial Plan of Macedonia to 2040, which was presented in Bitola with a special focus on the Pelagonia region. A nice number. Except it's written in a draft, with a fourteen-year deadline.

The plan aims to link the three larger cities furthest from Skopje - Bitola, Strumica and Ohrid - to the capital by rail in around 90 minutes. For Bitola, the recipe was laid out by Professor Zoran Karakutovski of the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Skopje: a new high-speed line from Skopje via the railway station in Gradsko, with a diversion towards Rosoman and Raec and a tunnel under the Pletvar pass. That would put Prilep around an hour from Skopje.

The Prilep - Bitola section would be rebuilt and electrified, with train speeds of 120 to 149 kilometres per hour. Further down the line, the plan envisages connecting Bitola to Ohrid airport as well, via the Bitola - Resen railway.

For now, all of this is a projection in a draft document. Making it real will depend on further planning, financing and construction - three words behind which, in the Balkans, entire decades often hide. How many fast railways have made it from draft to platform so far?

Nobody disputes that Pelagonia deserves a better connection to the rest of the country. But the people of Bitola will believe in those 80 minutes only when they see the first machine on the route towards Pletvar - not another slide in a presentation.