El proyecto ferroviario del Corredor numero 8: historia de una ocasión perdida

This work aims at telling the never-achieved story of the railways that should have linked the Albanian coast to the Aegean and Black Sea ports, crossing the southern regions of Balkans. Known at the end of the nineteenth century as the Italian Trans-Balkan Railway, the project of this massive rail infrastructure suffered from a number of economic, technical and political misadventures which effectively hampered its implementation. The same fate affected the Pan-European Corridor n. 8, which in the 1990s essentially adopted the older project’s track, broadening its goals with the perspective of integration with Eastern European Countries within the European Union. Starting from the Albanian port of Durrës, the Corridor n. 8 railway would have crossed Macedonia and Bulgaria to end in the Black Sea ports of Burgas and Varna. Thus, an essential link would have been established between the markets of the Southern Balkan area - still seriously severely underdeveloped in comparison to the rest of the European Union - and the Italian Adriatic coast, only a few miles from Albania. Moreover, a modern international railway would have facilitated both tourist flows towards those still poorly visited areas and regular migration flows. Above all, it would have sped up the development of Balkan countries, encouraging foreign investments as well as the transfer of technology and scientific culture.