Epic
of steel trails
A story about the history of railways
A whistle cuts through the morning calm, and suddenly the land stirs to the rhythm of clattering steel hooves. From the depths of locomotive fireboxes, from beneath dew-soaked sleepers, from platform lamps that remember more than many a chronicle, emerges a story of a land stitched together by rail.
On this track, dreams ripen alongside the pain of wrongs, and bridges connect the fractured shores of history. The train between Wrocław and Oława (1842) is the first whisper that, in its power, will grow into a chorus – all the way to the times when express trains will cut across the country so quickly that the Baltic Sea and the Tatras will fit into a single dream, and the morning in the north will catch up with the evening in the south.
The railway knows the taste of triumph and ash. It carries the Second Polish Republic towards the sea and the mountains, only to collapse in September 1939 along with its bridges amidst air raids. Later, in the shadow of ruins, it will learn to speak Polish again. In the golden decade, the clatter of wheels will be the rhythm of the sun and work, and when the transformation arrives – it will echo as a hollow sound on emptying platforms, only to return years later as a confident and stable pulse of modernity.
From EU plans, modernized main lines, and platforms smelling of coffee and fresh concrete, there will emerge a railway system that will once again want to be the first choice. Pendolino trains will catch up with time, night trains will return to the map, and high-speed lines will redraw the country's geometry. Beyond the horizon, the world will thunder: Japan, held for half a century to the steady rhythm of Shinkansens; China, stretched across steppes and mountains by tens of thousands of kilometers of high-speed tracks; America, awakening from its Western slumber.
This is a story about steel tracks that teach perseverance: when the structure breaks and the river swallows a span, the rail straightens again and carries on – further than we dared to dream yesterday. Are you getting on?
Before the steam erupted.
The beginnings of railways in the world (-1841)
Stone Age, Somerset Levels, western England: Neolithic builders using ash logs lay the Post Track causeway to transport spoils with dry feet. These are not yet rails, but the first consciously laid route that will, over time, inspire people to build real tracks. It's still just a path through the marsh, but it undoubtedly becomes the seed of engineering thinking about roads. From this pragmatic idea, after centuries of refinement, the concept of a permanent track will be born.
Two and a half thousand years later, the Greeks are carving the Diolkos out of limestone – a stone „track” with grooves, along which they drag boats on wooden carts across the Isthmus of Corinth, bypassing the storms around the Peloponnese. The Romans copy the patent in the ports of Egypt, smoothing the slabs so that the wheels glide as if on butter.
The Middle Ages also have their „rails”: the steep slope of Hohensalzburg Fortress has been crossed since 1515 by the Reisszug – a wooden funicular railway powered by human and animal muscle. As the mining renaissance accelerates, the Saxon scholar Georgius Agricola describes how wooden beams in mine tunnels transform a heavy wheelbarrow into a light cart. An Englishman, Huntingdon Beaumont, brings this idea to light: his wagonway from 1604 near Nottingham becomes the first surface „railway” for coal.
Then comes the coveted steam revolution. In 1804, Richard Trevithick sent a steel monster down the rails through Welsh valleys, and eight years later, Matthew Murray's „The Salamanca” showed it was no fleeting fancy, but big business.
On September 27, 1825, George Stephenson launched a steam locomotive on the Stockton–Darlington line, pulling wagons of coal. For regular passenger transport (except on the opening day), horses were still used. Steam finally began to carry passengers in 1830, when the first public express train sped from Liverpool to Manchester, and newspapers wrote that the cities began to shimmer in the windows „like stars in the night sky.” The world savored steam and from then on began to breathe it continuously.
Image: Map by an unknown cartographer from the Stockton & Darlington Railway report (1821). The original is located at the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers.
Not everyone approves: „The Quarterly Review” mocks, „Does a locomotive go faster than a carriage?” „Absurd!” it laments. But numbers are merciless. By 1845, the British already have over four thousand kilometers of track, the Germans - two thousand, the French - almost a thousand, and the railway fever spreads like an ink stain across parchment. People fear the „devil from the chimney,” but still buy a ticket: the speed of 40 km/h shortens distances like a "bird's flight," and practical iron overcomes superstition.
Thus a dream born of the Somerset marshes and carved from the rock of Corinth bursts forth with the steam-powered roar of revolution, setting the stage for the grand epic of the railways.
Iron roads to freedom.
The Birth of Railways under the Partitions (1842–1918)
Poland disappears from the maps, torn between three rapacious wolves, suffocating in its own uprisings and defeats. Paragraphs written in a foreign alphabet, decrees read from foreign pulpits, law like a muzzle. And suddenly, a whistle! The year is 1842, on May 22nd, between Wrocław and Oława, the first train on Polish lands rumbles! Soon it will become clear that steel can mend what paper has torn apart.
Photo: Warsaw. „Train on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway Line.”.
As early as June 14, 1845, in the Kingdom of Poland (Russian partition), a crowd of „Varsovians of all classes” gathered at the Jerozolimskie crossroads. Ten locomotives decorated with flowers, music, toasts under a tent – the first train on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway to Grodzisk covered the route „like a bird's flight” in 42 minutes! „A memorable day for Warsaw,” notes Warsaw Courier – „artery of life” that will „increase prosperity and shorten distances.”.
Galicia (Austrian Partition) joins a little later: on October 13, 1847, Kraków (then a free city) connects by rail with Mysłowice and the Prussian Silesian network, making a strategic leap towards coal and factories. By 1848, the Warsaw-Vienna railway reaches Maczki (the border) near Sosnowiec, ready to connect with the route to Vienna.
Photo: Railway lines in Polish lands in 1849.
The occupiers build „at home” and for themselves: three empires, three logics, zero trust. As late as 1856, the shortest train journey from Warsaw to Poznań followed an absurd arc: through Częstochowa, Silesia, Wrocław, and Berlin – because cooperation would mean someone else's benefit.
The second half of the century does not level out the differences, but rather deepens the divide. Prussia moves like a battering ram: a dense, efficient network encircles Silesia, Pomerania, and Greater Poland, main lines feed the steel mills, sidings load coal, and trains move troops like clockwork. Russia plays it differently: in the Kingdom of Poland, tracks grow slowly and reluctantly – only 1862 brings the Warsaw-St. Petersburg line. It comes to the point where Łódź has two main stations (Fabryczna and Kaliska) on two different lines – to travel from one to the other, one has to detour through Koluszki and Łódź Chojny. Galicia also rather trots than runs: yes, there's Krakow-Lviv and beyond, but a true feat of engineering and desperation is the Galician Transversal Railway (1884) through the Carpathians, which was meant to transport troops if needed, and immediately breathe life into the poor south.
At the end of the 19th century, the map speaks plainly: a dense, industrial west versus a sparse center and east. The partition borders are visible in the track gauge and—to this day—in the density of the lines. Yet, railways are written in golden letters in the process of improving the daily lives of Poles. At the beginning of the 20th century, trains carried peasants to markets, workers to factories, clerks to offices, and townspeople to the seaside. Train stations sprang up like temples, and the heroes of novels boarded carriages. By 1910, we had over 22,000 km of tracks. In 1914, in the vicinity of Wałbrzych, one of the first major electrifications appeared—almost 35 km „under the wires”—modernization was knocking at the door.
Photo: Development of the railway network in the Kingdom of Poland in the years 1842–1918.
The Great War begins to dictate new conditions. The railway is becoming the artery of the front: troops, artillery, the wounded – everything travels by rail. Germany, with its dense network at the border, is building field lines at the pace of a machine gun. The Russians are leaving „trackless belts” to hinder attacks – the Germans only wait for this, lay the missing tracks, and continue. Makeshift lines like Rozwadów–Lublin and Ostrowiec–Sandomierz are being built, and 600 mm narrow-gauge railways are being pushed where nothing has ever reached before. Bridges are blown up, stations are burned, and locomotives are carried off as spoils of war.
When Poland returned to the map in November 1918 after 123 years of captivity, it inherited a mosaic of three systems—though with a lesser problem of different track gauges: the occupying German authorities (1915–1918) had converted some Russian tracks to the European 1,435 mm gauge. At the end of the war, Polish railway workers went on strike and sabotaged the.
From the Tower of Babel to a common language.
The Establishment of PKP and Railways in the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939)
Warsaw, a rainy dawn on November 11, 1918. A chimera train rolls into the Main Station: „a Prussian locomotive, a Russian tender, Austrian carriages.” Each with a different coupling, a different plaque, a different language of instructions. This is what the partitions left behind: 15,947 km of tracks, including 7,362 km Russian, 4,357 km Austrian, 4,228 km Prussian, and over four thousand locomotives – Poland looks like a construction site after the fall of the Tower of Babel.
Even in the autumn of 1918, the Regency Council established a Railway Section within the Ministry of Communications in the capital. On February 8, 1919, it became a fully-fledged Ministry of Railways. The priority was to launch transport to the eastern front of the border war. Wagon crews entered Lviv under fire, delivering ammunition and bread – it was thanks to them that the city held out in the November defense and remained with Poland.
Photo: Head of State Józef Piłsudski in a train window, 1922.
The main problem remains the lack of a track between Warsaw and Poznań. In 1922, the Kutno – Konin – Strzałkowo section (111 km) opens. The journey is shortened by an hour, and the former Russian and Prussian systems operate on a single timetable.
On September 24, 1926, President Mościcki signed a decree establishing the Polish State Railways – an enterprise with its own assets and the mission of stitching the country together. Newspaper headlines cheered: „one ticket, one network, one speed”!
The Coal Trunk Line will soon begin operation – a 485 km track from Silesian mine shafts to the port of Gdynia. After the economic shock of the late 1920s, the construction of the trunk line almost came to a standstill, but salvation came from the Seine: the French-Polish Railway Company is injecting a fresh stream of francs into the project, which will once again swing the shovels, set the dump trucks filled with ballast in motion, and resound with the rhythm of riveting hammers. On March 1, 1933, the first train carrying coal brakes on the Baltic quay – Poland has just made its exports independent of the Free City of Danzig.
In 1933, Warsaw gets a cross-city tunnel, but steam locomotives choked on smoke. Therefore, in 1934, engineers built a 3 kV DC traction system: on December 15, 1936, an electric train departed on its first journey from Pruszków–Warsaw–Otwock, and by September 1939, electricity was already flowing along approximately 149 km of suburban lines.
In the mid-1930s, the Polish railway system was in the spotlight. Aerodynamics zipped along the tracks: the streamlined Pm36 from Chrzanów, dubbed the „Beautiful Pole” by the French and industry press, won gold for its design at the 1937 Paris Exposition of Technical Arts, proving that Polish aesthetic sense and engineering thought were racing neck-and-neck with the West.
Photo: The first Polish streamlined steam locomotive, series Pm36, built by the First Locomotive Factory in Chrzanów, exhibited at the International Art and Technology Exhibition in Paris in 1937.
A year earlier, Luxtorpeda was speeding towards the Tatra ridges and spruce valleys: during a special run from Krakow to Zakopane, it arrived in 2 hours and 18 minutes – a record that no train would break for over 80 years.
Photo: „Podhale Torpedo” (Luxtorpeda) at the railway station in Zakopane, 1936.
In 1936, the Polish railway system was a giant with iron legs: 20.1 thousand km of operational tracks, 138.7 million passengers annually, and 50.7 million tons of cargo. Carriages glided from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathians, and statistics placed the Second Polish Republic among the leading railway powers of Central Europe.
Train stations smell of coffee from the buffet and fresh paint from the train cars, and in 1938, Julian Tuwim listens to the rhythm of pistons in the station's hubbub and translates it into verses of „The Locomotive,” which „clatters” in the minds of successive generations of children.
Photo: Map of state and private railways and motor lines of the Polish State Railways in 1939.
No one expects that just a year later, steam smoke will mix with the billows of war dust. In September 1939, this intricate network, sewn together for two decades, will simultaneously become an artery of mobilization and a target of air raids. The tracks, which were meant to carry holiday trains and generate profit from trade, will once again transform into a frontline – but steel will live with the hope that even after the darkest night, the cheerful whistle of a train and children's laughter on the platform will always return.
The train enters the darkness.
World War II (1939-1945)
The last hours of August. The junction in Skierniewice pulsates like a heart on caffeine: car after car is coupled to trains designated with the codename echelon-1. The mobilization plan speaks of three thousand such trains – they are to transfer thirty-two Polish Army divisions within a week.
Photo: „Bombs from a German aircraft fall on a railway line in the East” – caption from the reverse of a 1939 press photograph.
The dawn of September 1st is pierced by the roar of sirens. Diving Ju-87s appear over the tracks in Kutno, shells tear into telegraph poles, and wires hum like plucked strings. Bombs fall on a train full of families fleeing east; black mushrooms of dust rise above the platforms. The next day, a similar tragedy unfolds in Koło: an explosion tosses train cars like matchboxes, and over a hundred bodies lie in the memory of the August sun.
On the trails, an escape and an assault are happening simultaneously. Steam engines, which should smell of pride, reek of fear. Retreating units are detonating bridges: at 5:30 on September 1st, the railway bridge in Tczew explodes to halt the German advance. Soon, the steel over the Pilica river will also ignite (night of September 6th to 7th near Tomaszów Mazowiecki).
Photo: Evacuated Poles in Schwarzenau (Austria), near the train station, 1939. Bundesarchiv, R 49 Bild-0138 / Holtfreter, Wilhelm / CC-BY-SA 3.0.
In the German Reich's annexed west, every train car receives a black plaque with an eagle and a swastika – Deutsche Reichsbahn. In the General Government, Ostbahn is born; as early as November 1939, Germany takes over 3,818 km of tracks, and within two years, they will expand this area by almost double. The Krakow office of Ostbahn directs the steel flow eastward: soldiers, fuel, ammunition – and empty wagons returning for further loads.
Photo: Direction signs on express trains from Krakow and Warsaw. Photomontage, 1940.
On the frontiers, Soviet track brigades widen nearly 5,000 km of track to the imperial gauge of 1,524 mm with the dull clang of crowbars. When the Wehrmacht penetrates deep into the USSR on June 22, 1941, these same rails are narrowed back to the „German” 1,435 mm. The track gauge becomes a measure of power – an iron ruler with which armies mark borders.
The ramp at Treblinka, the spur at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the platform at Sobibor – these are stations of no return. The railway, once a hero of progress, becomes an instrument of crime. Cattle cars carry millions of Jews to the extermination camps. Simultaneously, Soviet transports deport hundreds of thousands of Poles to Siberia and Central Asia. After the war, the surviving wagons will stand in museums like mournful sarcophagi, and the word transportation It will pierce like a verdict.
And yet, after dark, the rails can carry the whisper of rebellion. Polish partisans loosen bolts, falsify timetables, and cut the control cables for the signal boxes. In insurgent Warsaw in 1944, a Home Army unit composed of PKP (Polish State Railways) employees defended the tracks near Gdańsk station – they knew that whoever controlled the station controlled the city's oxygen supply.
Photo: A train derailed by the Polish underground. German soldiers in the background, 1944.
Immediately behind the front lines, railway brigades appear in faded work jackets, with a white and red shield bearing an eagle sewn onto their sleeves. They build makeshift bridges from logs, patch up switches with captured sleepers, and dispatch the first train with supplies to fighting Warsaw.
In the spring of 1945, the balance sheet was devastating: two-thirds of the bridges lay in rivers, over 20,000 km of tracks required immediate repairs, and out of four thousand pre-war steam locomotives, only about 1,600 were roadworthy (the rest were taken away or damaged). As if that were not enough, the Red Army confiscated the better elements of the infrastructure, such as the Sudeten electric railway network, machinery for the production and repair of rolling stock, or anything else it deemed useful in the USSR, for instance, one of the two tracks on the Gdynia – Szczecin line. In an extreme case, the town of Polanów in West Pomerania lost all five of its railway lines.
Polish dreams of railway power were suffocated – but not extinguished: in the whistle of the makeshift steam engine that sets off for the capital in the spring of 1945, one can hear the promise of a new beginning and see those dreams smoldering in the distance – postponed to a distant, post-war station.
Phoenix of steel.
Reconstruction of the People's Republic of Poland (1945-1970)
The last shell of World War II fades over the Vistula, as Polish tracks lie in ruins: the rubble of stations, rails bent like branches of an old willow, burnt-out wagons scattered by the roadside. However, even before the front finally falls silent, in liberated Lublin Voivodeship in July 1944, a group of railway workers establishes the PKWN Communications Department – the first post-war railway authority. With them, the Polish language of semaphores, timetables, and uniforms with a steel eagle will slowly return.
As armies move west, more District Directorates are reactivated: first in Lublin, then in Krakow, and in the autumn of 1944, in Warsaw's Praga district – the part of the capital that rises from its knees first. On March 1, 1945, the Ministry of Communications returns to the devastated Warsaw – railway workers show the world that the heart of PKP still beats. Among other things, the relocation of railway workers from the Vilnius District Directorate to the new Olsztyn District Directorate is organized, and similarly, in batches – from Lviv to Wrocław.
Reconstruction begins immediately. The team from the PKP Warsaw Directorate, just a week after the city's liberation, stands under the overhead power lines on the Otwock line. In just over a dozen months, on July 14, 1946, the first post-war electric train will depart from Otwock – a symbol that the spark survived the era of darkness. In only five years after the war, the entire pre-war Warsaw suburban network will be rebuilt.
But the railway is not just Warsaw. The Recovered Territories in the west and north of Poland welcome new hosts with abandoned stations bearing Prussian inscriptions. Not everything can be saved – the Red Army takes about two thousand kilometers of track, sending them as trophies to the east. Meanwhile, in the Kresy, Poles irreversibly lose the entire railway network: thousands of wagons and hundreds of locomotives disappear. Similarly, Polish Lux-torpedos and the best locomotives from Fablok – the Pt31 – are „lost” in Austria. The Polish railway shrinks in the east but spreads its wings on new western routes – from the Baltic Sea to the Oder.
The great resettlements of 1945–1947 – crowds of people on platforms, hundreds of thousands of Poles being moved from the Kresy to Lower Silesia and Pomerania, with memories of their former lives packed into a single suitcase – are only possible thanks to the railway. Simultaneously, transports of expelled Germans travel in the opposite direction. Wagons once again become a symbol of defeating the enemy, of hope, and of a new life – although this life is born from the pain of cramped compartments and multi-day journeys through a ravaged country.
In the late 1940s, steam locomotives were carrying not only refugees but also steel, cement, and coal for the grand dream builders of the six-year plan. In 1950, the railway reached almost pre-war dimensions—over 26,000 kilometers of tracks. However, only 156 kilometers were electrified. Steam reigned supreme—the last new TKt48 steam locomotive from Fablok in Chrzanów left the factory floor only in 1957.
Photo: Polish railway network in the winter of 1952/1953.
But the 1950s also saw the start of a quiet revolution in propulsion. The first diesel locomotives – SM03 and SM30 – entered the sidings in the shadow of powerful steam engines, and electrification finally got into full swing. After Warsaw, it was time for Silesia and the strategic Coal Trunk Line. From November 1965, the route from Tarnowskie Góry to Zduńska Wola Karsznice was already electrified, and four years later, electric trains reached Gdynia.
The socialist railway becomes a propagandistic icon of success. Labor heroes break records: in the famous „Action 1000 Kilometers,” railway workers replace one thousand kilometers of track in a single year! In the mid-1960s, as the railway celebrates more anniversaries of lines and junctions, the proud faces of railway workers look out from commemorative posters at station exhibitions.
In the same year – on October 1st – Japan launched its first high-speed railway, the Shinkansen, from Tokyo to Osaka. Poland looks at this technological marvel with admiration, but also with a hint of bitterness – that it's not our platforms being sliced through by lightning speed. However, every railway worker knows that great dreams begin with a single spark – like the one that once flashed over the Otwock line, when the first platform lights pierced the night over the ruins of Warsaw, promising a new beginning.
The railway's rebuilding era is becoming a daily reality for Poles once again – passenger trains for work, holiday trains to the Baltic. In 1951, the SKM in the Tricity begins, the rail bloodstream of a large agglomeration. By the end of the 1950s, the railway is accelerating – PKP launches regular, fast connections between major cities, giving people the rhythm they've waited decades for. And although the steam whistles are slowly falling silent, progress re-enters the stage – because the Polish railway is a journey with no final destination.
A billion hearts under one whistle.
The Golden Age of the Polish People's Republic (1970-1989)
July 1977 – Warszawa Gdańska train station trembles like a drum as a loudspeaker spits out carriage numbers. The aroma of mortadella sandwiches and heated grease hangs over the platforms. On one summer weekend, PKP (Polish State Railways) sends up to five times more trains than usual to the seaside. On every bench, in every vestibule of the carriages, someone sits with a quilt and a cigarette. Statistics will later show 1.14 billion passengers in the whole of 1977 – an absolute record that no one will beat. The railway was then tearing across the country like a raging river in too narrow a channel: a worker was going to the steel mill, a student to student festivals, a family on vacation to Ustka.
Photo: Przemyśl. Youth - travelers camping on summer days at the main PKP train station, photo by A. Baranowski, 1989.
The last steam locomotives are dying out on the sidings, but the clatter of electric and diesel engines already rules the main lines: the green-and-lime EU07 and the mighty ET22 „bulls” pull express trains with sunny names promising adventure: „Hel,” „Karpaty,” „Błękitna Fala.” In suburban traffic, the yellow-and-blue EN57 reigns supreme, running since 1962 like an immortal collective taxi. The train is cheap, accessible, and loud; boys in shorts count the traction poles, and in the aisles, people play "tysiąc" (a card game) while sitting on their suitcases. No one can imagine Poland without the clatter of wheels.
At the same time, design offices were drawing another dream on the map: the Central Trunk Railway (CMK). The decision to build it was made in 1971; the first train departed on September 26, 1974, running on the new Zawiercie–Idzikowice track. When the entire Zawiercie–Grodzisk Mazowiecki section was connected to the network and electrified on December 23, 1977, the map gained 224 km of almost perfect straight line, designed for speeds of up to 250 km/h. Government chronicles show footage from the inaugural run: party secretaries shake hands with train drivers, cameras record 160 km/h – a speed that smelled of the West back then.
Poland is in pursuit: in 1988, CMK allows scheduled speeds of 160 km/h, and in tests of the second-generation Pendolino in May 1994, it achieves the promised 250 km/h. The current, third generation, will reach 293 km/h in 2013 without any track or vehicle improvements, proving that the tracks laid during the Gierek era were designed with speeds in mind that would only become a reality in the next millennium.
In the late 80s, steam locomotives still chugged here and there on sidings. Under the wires, nearly 7,000 km of routes are already in use – almost 28% of the network. However, the scent of winding down is slowly starting to make itself felt: carriages are fading, lines are being closed, and delays are becoming part of folklore. A joke circulates then (attributed to G.K. Chesterton, it perfectly fits the reality of PKP): „The only way to catch your train is to miss the previous one.” Nevertheless, in 1985, the railway still carried nearly a billion passengers, and over 380,000 people worked on and for the tracks. Poland is heading towards transformation – and no one knows how many routes will survive. However, the echo of that golden decade still reverberates in the steel viaducts of CMK, sounds in the clatter of wheels, and reminds us that even a tired railway can move with the momentum of the future.
Glass houses - a reality.
Today (1989-2025)
1989. Free elections, Poland stands on the threshold of transformation. The 1990s greet it with faded station signs, peeling wagon paint, and hoarse megaphone voices. The railway embarks on a new Poland with a network as dense as a meticulously woven spiderweb of decades (about 14,000 miles of track), but its rolling stock and rails reek of the 70s and 80s. New asphalt and buses rapidly begin to snatch passengers away: from 613 million in 1989 to 361 million in 2000, and down to less than 258 million in 2005. Platforms empty, side lines close like forgotten books, and breakdowns become the refrain of everyday life. The railway – once the hero of many seasons – looks as if it's tiredly stepping off the marquee.
Then the scalpel arrives: the reform carves the monolith into organs. The act of September 8, 2000, switches the tracks: from January 1, 2001, PKP S.A. is born, and alongside it, specialized companies – PKP PLK for tracks, PKP Intercity for long-distance, PKP Przewozy Regionalne for daily commutes, PKP Cargo for freight. It hurts: restructuring, debts to be repaid, protests; but without this operation, the patient might never have recovered.
On May 1, 2004, Poland joined the European Union, and with membership, the first real oxygen flowed into the country on the Vistula River: funds for tracks, bridges, and platforms. Bulldozers removed worn-out rails, electricians hung fresh wires, and manual signal boxes gave way to computer screens in modern control centers. The E30 (Berlin–Warsaw–Minsk) and E65 (Gdynia–Warsaw) corridors regained speed, and Rail Baltica (E75), integrated into TEN-T, connected Warsaw via Białystok–Ełk–Suwałki to Kaunas, then to Riga and Tallinn, and by ferry to Helsinki. On the Warsaw–Gdańsk route, travel time was reduced to 2 hours and 46 minutes (best trips down to 2 hours and 25 minutes), and the train ceased to be a last resort – it once again became the first and conscious choice.
The landscape of carriers is changing in parallel. Local governments are putting their own colors on the tracks: Masovian Railways since 2005, followed by Lower Silesian Railways (2007) and Silesian Railways (2017). Modern Elf, Impuls, and Dart trains are appearing on the platforms: the yellow and blue EN57, a veteran, must give way to air conditioning, Wi-Fi, and power outlets. The monopoly in freight is crumbling: alongside PKP Cargo (approx. 29.4% of the market in 2024), private giants are growing. Competition is forcing punctuality and standards, and tickets are starting to reside on smartphones (Bilkom).
On December 14, 2014, a symbol of a new era entered the tracks: the first ED250 (EIP) Pendolino. 200 km/h becomes commonplace, and the Warszawa–Kraków journey in approximately 2 hours and 28 minutes ceases to be a brochure dream. Train stations are modernized: in 2014, the new, underground building of Kraków Główny was opened, and Warszawa Centralna shines after its facelift for Euro 2012. Night trains with sleeping and couchette cars to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest return – comfortable overnight stays on rails become a real alternative to short flights across Europe.
Statystyka – kiedyś bezlitosna – zaczyna opowiadać nową historię. Z dołka 257,6 mln pasażerów w 2005 r. pniemy się do 335,9 mln w 2019 r., po pandemicznym potknięciu wracamy do 342,2 mln w 2022 r., by w 2024 r. pobić rekord XXI wieku: 407,5 mln. Pociągi jadą dalej i częściej – średnio 69,9 km na podróż – a 91,64% składów osobowych dojeżdża na czas.
The French TGV has been operating since 1981, the German ICE since 1991, Spain has almost four thousand kilometers of tracks for speeds up to 350 km/h, and Italy over 1,400 km. Our ED250 trains run at 200 km/h commercially (homologated for 250), and the CPK plan outlines the first true high-speed lines with a high-speed rail tunnel under Łódź (4.6 km) and a network of spokes that will connect metropolises in a travel time measured more by coffee than by lunch. Meanwhile, Japan – since 1964 – and China – today with over 40,000 km of network – are setting the bar high, and America is waking up in the Boston–Washington corridor.
Poland? We have an old joke – „the only way to catch a train is to miss the previous one” – that's starting to sound weaker. Because although wagons from the 70s still occasionally flash by from a siding, the country is moving forward: modernized tracks, clean trains, ticketing apps, a new travel culture. The way people think has also changed – young people are choosing trains not out of necessity, but out of conviction: less CO₂, more time for a book, work, or sleep.
The transformation began with a bitter diagnosis and empty platforms. Today, modernity flows through the arteries of many stations. And although there are no fireworks like in an advertisement, there is something better: a rhythm that delivers the promise every day that tomorrow we will travel faster, more comfortably, further.
The train is catching up to time.
Tomorrow (2025-)
Wieczór w gabinecie planisty pachnie papierem i świeżym drukiem. Na biurku leżą dokumenty, które mają wagę rozkładu jazdy dla całego kontynentu: „Strategia zrównoważonej i inteligentnej mobilności” Komisji Europejskiej z grudnia 2020 r. obiecuje, że do 2030 r. ruch kolei dużych prędkości podwoi się, a do 2050 r. – potroi; towar na torach ma wzrosnąć o 50% do 2030 r., a do połowy stulecia – o 100%.
On August 26, 2022, the Polish calendar shows: The Council of Ministers adopts „Directions for the Development of Intermodal Transport until 2030 with a perspective to 2040” – the slogan „TIRs on tracks” ceases to be a declaration and becomes homework, with a monitoring system and a list of investments. A moment later, PKP PLK publishes „Investment plans for 2021–2030 with a perspective to 2040”: tables record strengthened track beds, higher speeds on main lines, new logistics centers, and terminals. A clear landscape of the next decade emerges from these documents: heavy container trains move from roads to tracks, and passenger express trains become more frequent in schedules with clockwork regularity.
The CPK Program – the largest infrastructure undertaking in our history – is drawing the „Y” Line on the map: Warsaw–CPK–Łódź, and further by 2035 to Wrocław and Poznań. The 350 km/h parameter is not a fantasy here, but a design assumption; the Warsaw–Wrocław journey is to be reduced to about two hours. The network is complemented by „spokes”: to Lublin, Rzeszów, Kielce – lines that are to connect the peripheries with the center and support freight transport with new terminals. After the design tenders in 2023, the first section of the High-Speed Rail Warsaw–Łódź is to begin construction in 2026, in order to align with the launch of the airport hub near Baranów, planned for the end of 2032.
Simultaneously, the circulatory system of technology is changing. In Lower Saxony, Alstom's Coradia iLint hydrogen trains have been running since the summer of 2022. They are refueled in Bremervörde and leave behind water vapor, not soot. On lines without overhead wires, battery trains are being tested: the Siemens Cityjet Eco in Austria (2019-2020), and from 2024, Britain's TransPennine Express will test Class 802 battery trains, which can travel several dozen kilometers without power. Algorithms are working in the background: the European ERTMS/ETCS signaling system is set to cover approximately 9,800 km of TEN-T lines in Poland at Level 2 by 2050 – fewer red lights, more capacity, and greater safety. Automation is no longer a laboratory fairy tale: the French conducted remote operation of freight trains in 2019, Tokyo has had the automated Yurikamome line since the 1990s, and Dubai has had a driverless metro since 2009. The future railway worker will likely be a supervising pilot rather than an operator with a hand on the controller.
The future is also clearly visible on the horizon in futuristic colors. The SCMaglev in Japan reached 603 km/h in trials (April 2015). Work is underway on tracks where air resistance dies down to a whisper – speeds of up to a thousand kilometers per hour are no longer just a hope. Will this replace airplanes on domestic routes? We don't know. But railways have always been a laboratory of dreams – and if time can be cheated, they will try.
Final? Today, EU documents set targets for 2030 and 2050, national resolutions add chapters on intermodality, and the CPK program strikes chords of major reconstruction. Tomorrow, longer, quieter, cleaner trains will depart from stations, heavy cargo will switch from asphalt to steel, and maps will pulsate with new arteries of high-speed connections. From steam to electricity, from diesel to hydrogen, from rails to levitation – everything is changing except the purpose of the road: to connect people and shorten distances. The railway continues. And – most importantly – in the right direction.