Belgrade Centre railway station, usually known as Prokop, is now the Serbian capital’s principal rail station, although its name is slightly aspirational about how central it actually is. The station lies south of the historic centre in the Savski Venac district, partly beneath a large concrete deck. Construction began during the 1970s, but progress was intermittent enough to make it one of those infrastructure projects that appeared determined to outlive everyone responsible for building it. It was all a bit sub-optimal and rather like HS2 in the end, although they did get there.
I arrived at the station from the non decadent side and thought that it was all a bit basic. It transpired that this was the old section of the building which hadn’t really been modernised.
This is the decadent entrance that has been constructed. Passenger services were introduced gradually, with the station taking on a larger role from 2016 before officially replacing the old Belgrade Main station on 1 July 2018. That elegant station had stood beside the River Sava since 1884 and was once used by the Orient Express, but its platforms and railway land were cleared as part of the Belgrade Waterfront development. I went to see that station on my last trip to Belgrade and it’s something of a ghost building now, a former transportation hub just sitting empty. This meant that the city’s main station moved away from the traditional centre and into Prokop, leaving arriving passengers to discover that Belgrade Centre is more of an institutional aspiration than a useful central location.
For several years Prokop operated without a proper station building, leaving a rather unfinished first impression for the capital’s principal railway gateway. A modern glass and steel terminal finally opened above the platforms in October 2023, providing ticket offices, waiting areas, shops and improved access. It is now certainly decadent.
I purchased snacks for the journey from a nearby shop in a housing estate, before I realised that there was a shop at the station building itself. On the bright side, I likely paid a little less for my bag of healthy snacks. This is where Jonathan joined me as he had gone on something of a journey to get to the station, a story that I’ll tell later on.
And here are the platforms and our service was the 09:45 service to Bar.
Ready on the platform for our journey to Podgorica, but more of that two-part journey in the next post.