The socialist federation of Yugoslavia was once crisscrossed by over six thousand miles of rail. Trains conveyed freight from Kosovan mines to Serbian factories and brought youths from all six constituent republics to the Croatian coast for summer camps. In an era when the prized Yugoslav passport granted unparalleled access to both West and East, you could step on a train in Belgrade and wake up in neighboring Austria, Hungary, or even Istanbul, via one iteration of the Orient Express.

But following Yugoslavia’s violent breakup into a patchwork of ethnically stratified states, the rail network is a shadow of its former self. War, NATO bombing, privatization, neglect, theft, the imposition of borders drawn up in Western conference rooms, and the exploitative entry of foreign capital all played their part in the network’s ongoing degradation. Its decline encapsulates the fate of the western Balkans in the postsocialist era.

Today, only a single passenger line ever leaves Serbian territory — the storied, dilapidated line from Belgrade to Bar on the Montenegrin coast. This major feat of Yugoslav engineering took nearly a quarter century to complete, crossing some of Europe’s most beautiful mountains via over sixty miles of tunnels and over four hundred bridges, including what was once the world’s highest railway bridge. Rolling slowly through the pine-covered summits, greeted at mountain stopovers by stationmasters with peaked caps and whistles, the railway was an achievement of massive scale. In this rugged terrain, it’s easy to imagine the harsh conditions which led to the death of over a hundred people during the line’s construction — a stark reminder that Yugoslavia’s model of socialism often failed to ensure workers adequate protection.