A derailment shows how thin the Rijeka lifeline is, while Croatia finally funds the fix on RH1

The story of the week is a grain train that lost its brakes and went into a ravine at Meja on Saturday 10 October. Nobody was hurt, but the Zagreb–Rijeka line is shut and the port has lost its heavy-axle rail route. Reports say clearing and repair could take about a week. The only alternative, via Ljubljana, Pivka and Šapjane, is longer and has an axle-load restriction that rules out the heaviest trains (RailFreight says 18 t, TrasportoEuropa says 20 t; either way below the 22.5 t of the main line). If you have bulk or rail-dependent cargo for Rijeka this week, assume delay and ask your carrier now what they can reroute.

For Koper this is a small, temporary opening, not a windfall. Any Rijeka-bound traffic that can switch discharge port will only do so if the cost and timing work, and the Slovenian route through Pivka is the same one the diverted trains would have to use. Treat Koper as a fallback for flexible cargo, and keep an eye on slot availability on the Slovenian side before promising anything. The larger point is risk: this is the third serious incident on the Rijeka approach since August, after a passenger train and a freight train collided near Škrinjar in August, injuring 25 people, and a freight train derailed at Sušak-Pećine on 2 September, closing the line for two days. The line has gone down for days at a time before. A single-route dependency is a planning risk, whatever the port.

The week’s good news is on the same corridor. Croatia signed a €677 million construction contract on 1 October to double-track the 83 km Dugo Selo–Novska section of RH1, the last single-track stretch on that route inside Croatia. Works start in the first half of 2027 and run nearly six years, so this is a 2032–33 capacity story, not something to book against. In the meantime expect construction disruption on a line that is already fragile.

Further south and east, the picture is mixed. North Macedonia started works on the €139 million Bukojcani–Kicevo motorway on Corridor VIII, which helps the road link westward in the medium term. And Ukraine and Romania agreed to keep six daily trains running to Constanța, with talks on extra Danube port capacity at Galați and Brăila, while the EBRD gave Ukrainian Railways €130 million in emergency liquidity. For anyone planning relief or reconstruction cargo, the practical read is that Black Sea routing through Romania is getting institutional backing, and the Adriatic is not yet part of that conversation.

Note on scope: only four items passed verification this week. I left out anything dated outside the 7–10 day window or that I could not confirm by reading the source.