Introduction: The Lie of the Land
It isn't about Radom. Indeed, the central-Polish city gets little mention here. Rather, the theme is spirit of place; place connected to place by rail; steel threads – parallel lines converging at the vanishing point, connecting communities to each other – villages to towns, suburbs to cities, cities to cities. Rails tie economies together, rails bind nations. I'm also keen to write about the people whose livelihoods depend on the line, the passengers – commuters or travellers – and the railway staff who make the trains run.
Railway Line No. 8 runs some 100km (62 miles) south from Warsaw to Radom, and then a further 215km (133 miles) from Radom to Kraków via Kielce. The line is one of seven main lines radiating out of Warsaw. My focus is on the local passenger services operated by Koleje Mazowieckie that run up and down the northern end of Line No. 8, the R8 all-stations service and RE8 accelerated service between Warsaw and Radom. These run within the province (voivodship) of Mazowsze, or Mazovia in English – ‘the heart of Poland’. Koleje Mazowieckie, the train operator, is owned by the province of Mazowsze.
Radom itself is the size of Portsmouth or Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It’s Poland’s 14th most populous town; it has yet to find its way after the collapse of communism 30 years ago. Frankly, there’s little that’s attractive in Radom – for some, it’s home, for others, a destination, or merely a place that one passes through. But it’s not my main theme. Forgive me if you came here thinking this might be about Radom. If it’s about anywhere, this book is about the dormitories of Warsaw, the capital’s further exurbs, the działkalands lying south of the capital, the apple-growing districts around Warka and the rural interstices of forests and fields that stretch from the southern banks of the Pilica river to Radom itself.
It isn't about Radom but about the journey to Radom and all the places in between – the journey here being as important as the destination. Spirit of place is that elusive character, atmosphere or klimat projected upon the human sensibilities by a given landscape. Different landscapes influence us in different ways – how we feel, how we respond emotionally to the aesthetics of the environment around us. Like major and minor keys in music, our surroundings can lift our mood or make us sad. Architecture and landscape make a profound difference.
The most basic of taxonomies or typologies will break landscape down into urban, suburban or rural; mountains or plains, river banks, meadows, coasts or forests. But landscape and our emotional response to it can be subtle. The curve in the road and the mystery of what lies beyond. A slight rise towards a wooded hill, then a gentle dip towards a river’s meander; some old houses upon a windswept ridge. Some landscapes are to be appreciated, savoured; others – spoilt by too many manmade eyesores – are best avoided for the health of the soul. I’d take the long way round rather than go through somewhere depressing. Often I’d walk the nice way home from school or from work, even though it was longer.
The railway line itself is neither incidental nor accidental to landscape. As it progresses, it forms the framework, the backbone, as do our roads, without which only an inchoate collection of place names would exist, scattered, difficult to link together, economically, socially or aesthetically; stars without a constellation.
Since childhood, railways have always offered me comfort; unchanging iron roads to elsewhere and to the past. Rails standing four feet eight and a half inches apart as they did at the time of George Stephenson's Rocket, as they are in Britain today, as they are across much of America and Europe. I will, of course, include descriptions of the stations and rolling stock found on the Warsaw-Radom line, but I’ll also be telling a human story – of the people travelling on the trains, of the places served by the line, the experience of travel – the sense of motion through landscape.
And above all, the spirit of place and how it changes as one travels south. The comforting rhythm of the clickety-clack, the distant sound of a train’s horn as it approaches a level crossing, the warmth of the train after a wait on an icy platform, the distant rumble of the long coal-train running through the night to feed the power station. The train is reassuringly familiar, it soothes. Even when it runs late, one is willing to forgive it.
Railways have always attracted my aesthetic sensibilities. I can still recall the bridge at West Ealing suddenly disappearing in fog as a steam-hauled express charged through underneath, headed for Paddington – this would have been 1960 or 1961. Or watching the single-carriage diesel-powered Greenford car disappearing around the curve between West Ealing and Drayton Green Halt. Or browsing through the Hornby Dublo catalogue, reading books about trains from the Rev. W. Awdry's The Railway Series to Blandford's beautifully illustrated Railways of the World in Colour by O.S. Nock. And I remember well my West London school-days in the early 1970s, heading home on the Underground to Ealing Broadway station – and imagining what lay west of Ealing along the main line – Brunel’s Great West Railway as once was; Hanwell, Southall, Hayes, West Drayton, Iver, Langley and Slough. Burnham, Taplow, Maidenhead, Twyford, Reading. And those pastoral branch lines – to Marlow, to Henley-on-Thames.
Much was in my imagination, fired by the 1920s and 1930s posters advertising the old GWR, in particular the strong, bright, compositions of Frank Newbould. I have never been one for train-spotting; collecting train numbers for its own sake is an unfulfilling pastime. The allure for me has rather been railway architecture and the place of the railway within the landscape. The black-and-white photos of O. Winston Link, taken towards the end of the steam era in America, are for me the epitome of this aesthetic.
A great influence on me was Sir John Betjeman’s Metro-Land, the late poet-laureate’s televisual poem, which I watched when it was first screened in late February 1973. Before that magical, life-changing moment, I had already encountered Betjeman’s works in my English O-level class. His depictions in Metro-Land of a recently bygone England had a profound impact on my youthful sensibilities. The atmosphere resonated with me. So much so that I’d travel out, by train or by bicycle, out west from London, to sample what was left of the atmosphere described by Betjeman – Moor Park, Chorleywood, Quainton Road, Verney Junction and Brill. And, of course, there were many explorations of those GWR stations west of Slough, in particular the branch lines – to Marlow, to Henley-on-Thames.
Broader of gauge and well to the east, the railway line of Venedikt Yerofeyev’s Moscow-Petushki is another literary inspiration for me. This late-Soviet era text, sodden in alcohol, relates better to the experience of the Warsaw-Radom line than the commuter trains running west out of London. Many tins of Warka Strong have been quaffed, many małpki of Absolwent vodka knocked back, many illicit Klubowe cigarettes smoked by a hardcore of passengers to deaden the existential pain of a life shackled to the daily long-distance commute into Warsaw. As soon as the Radom-bound train begins to move, in the rear compartment of the train, the tins are cracked open, the miniatures of vodka unscrewed, the cigarettes lit – despite signs prohibiting such behaviour. Yerofeyev’s drinkers took this all a stage further – including hair lacquer, foot deodorant and brake fluid to the less exotic components of cocktails devised by Petushki-bound passengers. But then Russians were always exaggerated versions of Poles (or else Poles are watered-down, Europeanised versions of Russians). Moscow-Petushki is a line similar in length and exurban character to Warsaw-Radom; Moscow’s economic pull is greater than Warsaw’s, its gravitational effects therefore stronger and farther-reaching. The modernisation of the Radom line, and modern rolling stock without the enclosed rear compartment, have drastically reduced the incidence of anti-social behaviour. Rarely do I see vodka swigged from the bottle; beer swigging is likewise something quite unusual post-modernisation.
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The building of a railway line from Warsaw to Radom was one of interwar Poland's biggest railway infrastructure projects. The country, newly restored to the map of Europe in 1918 after 123 years of partition, needed to reunify itself. Building railways was an important part of that process, as was Poland’s dash for modernity through industrialisation. The Central Industrial District (Centralny Okręg Przemysłowy, COP) had a vital role to play in this. The metal-bashing towns of Radom, Kielce, Stalowa Wola, Starachowice, had to be linked to Warsaw (formerly within the Russian empire) and to Kraków (formerly within the Austro-Hungarian empire) – and so the railway was built.
Work began in the spring of 1933 and the line was ceremonially opened on 24 November 1934. It took a mere 20 months to link Warsaw to Radom. This included building a bridge over the river Pilica, the only substantial obstacle along the relatively flat route (its lowest point being 65m above sea level, its highest 174m).
And over 80 years later, work to re-lay the entire track with a new track bed, sleepers, rails, gantries and signalling got under way (it started in September 2015 and was finally completed in June 2022). The track between Warka and Radom was doubled; four new stations sprang up along the way. Seven years to renovate what took less than two years to build.
Just before work began in earnest, the journey between Radom and Warsaw West (Warszawa Zachodnia) took two hours and 26 minutes. This was 19 minutes longer than it took in 1935, when the all-stations service was steam-hauled. The journey then took two hours and seven minutes. The modernisation programme, carried out in three stages (Warsaw-Czachówek Południowy, Czachówek Południowy-Warka and Warka-Radom), has shaved half an hour off travel times between the two cities, with the fastest InterCity trains, stopping only at three intermediate stops along the line, doing the journey in just 75 minutes. This may seem like a tall order, but it's been done before; the journey from Warsaw to Łódź, Poland’s second-largest city, 131km (83 miles), now takes 75 minutes instead of the two hours and 15 minutes it used to take before the line was modernised.
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I have lived in Poland since 1997; I have got to know the northern end of the Warsaw-Radom line intimately as a daily commuter and as the owner of a działka near Chynów station. I have walked (in stages) alongside the line all the way between Warszawa Służewiec and the Pilica river and a little beyond. However, south of the Pilica, the lands on either side of the line are less familiar to me, my explorations here have been by motorbike as well as by train.
Radom itself is – for a Polish city of its size – a relatively unknown place. For me and for most Poles. Today, it’s neither an administrative centre of a province, as is Kielce (to Radom’s south – and a smaller city), nor does Radom offer any compelling economic, historic or aesthetic reasons to visit. In my 25-plus years in Poland I have visited lots of towns smaller than Radom such as Toruń, Rzeszów, Gliwice, Opole or indeed Kielce on many occasions, but for some reason I’ve only been into Radom once (to speak at a conference about public transport). Ah yes, I've been to the Radom Air Show twice, but that's out of town.
Generally, Radom is a fly-over, drive-past, change-trains kind of town. I am sorry if you’re from there. “Transport, more than anything, changes a place,” said John Betjeman. How right he was. Now that the new S7 expressway skirts the town to the west, the average Varsovian will have even less contact with Radom than ever before as they drive down the expressway to Kraków and the south. No reason to stop there – not even for fuel or food.
But Radom has plenty of contact with Warsaw. The relationship is one-way; it’s like a child from a poor home who often gets to visit his friends in their rich homes – friends who never go to visit him in his home. Many Radomiaks are caught in the gravitational pull of Warsaw’s economy. Historically, Radom’s unemployment rate has been six or seven times higher than in Warsaw. As I write (November 2023), it’s 1.4% in Warsaw, 9.4% in Radom. Why is this? And why is Radom’s unemployment rate persistently double that of other second-league Polish cities? In Kielce, it’s only 4.6%.
Part of the answer lies in Radom’s proximity to Warsaw. For every Radomiak making that long-distance commute to the capital by train, there’s another one heading in by bus or by car. Many sign on as unemployed to maintain access to public healthcare while working in the capital’s cash-in-hand economy.
A manufacturing centre since the 1930s, a cornerstone of the COP - the central industrial zone, the city became famous for manufacturing guns, typewriters and sewing machines. Punished by the communist authorities after the 1976 riots in the city, Radom was wilfully neglected. Then came the political and economic transformation following the collapse of communism. This seismic event, ending the Cold War, coincided precisely with the IT revolution, and accelerating globalisation. Demand for sewing machines, typewriters and Kalashnikovs fell dramatically. The state-owned factories collapsed or shrank, and there was little to take their place. Other similarly fallen cities – Łódź, Lublin, Kielce, Bydgoszcz, Rzeszów – all had some kind of a plan to reinvent themselves, attract inward investment from abroad, find a niche, develop a specialisation, a cluster; but Radom could think of little. Other than exporting its people to Warsaw. And after Poland’s accession to the EU, to the newly opened labour markets of Western Europe.
Radom’s poverty relative to other Polish cities is evident – there are fewer restaurants, many bureaux de change for locals returning from the west needing to change their euros or pounds into zlotys; many lumpexy (privately-run second-hand clothes shops that sell apparel by weight – “that’s a nice blouse! How much did it weigh?”), many chwilówki (payday-loan shops), lombardy (pawn shops) and 24-hour alcohol shops. And a few malls to offer the semblance of a modern retail experience.
Working in Warsaw, living in Radom or in surrounding villages, these daily long-distance commuters are caught in a trap. Unable to up roots and move permanently to the capital – usually for family or financial reasons or both – they find themselves stuck in the endless commute, ever at the mercy of lengthy delays, signal failures, rolling-stock malfunctions, timetable alterations due to interminable engineering work or fallen overhead power lines. Or even stolen power lines. In summer, the railway journey at both ends of the working day can offer some pleasure (assuming the passenger has a window seat). In midwinter, the daily grind can be hellish, in darkness throughout. The perpetually tired faces of the long-distance daily commuters tell of resignation to a life of hardship, an endless treadmill of monotony from which there is no escape. Property in Warsaw is expensive to rent, expensive to buy.
Many times I have stood on a platform, smartphone in hand, comparing the online timetable with the view down the line – the train should have been here 20 minutes ago, there’s still no sign of it. Other passengers, late for work, late for appointments, accept their fate. There’s nothing to be gained by being angry at this state of affairs. It happens – that’s just the way it is. (It must be said, that since the completion of the line's upgrade, major delays have become much rarer, yet still can happen.)
The 04:16 Koleje Mazowieckie train prepares to depart from Radom, all stations to Warsaw. It’s mid-January and it’s still nearly three and a half hours before sunrise. Outside the station, the tired snow has refrozen overnight, a north-easterly wind blows in from the Arctic. Having woken up at a quarter to three, washed, dressed, grabbed some breakfast, ghostly forms, swaddled against the midwinter frost in quilted supermarket anoraks, have made their way to Radom station to board the train ahead of the two-and-a quarter-hour journey into central Warsaw (stopping at all stations). Arriving to start work in the cleaning, catering or construction in good time for seven am, Warsaw is where they find employment and a means to live. And Radom is where the overheated Warsaw labour market finds willing hands.
For many passengers, much of the journey is spent sleeping. Once on the train, the heating on, coats and scarves are off, rolled up and used as pillows, heads slump as the train moves up the line, seats fill quickly at every station along the way. By the time the train reaches Warsaw’s exurbs, it’s standing room only.
You can tell the long-distance commuters from the short-hop suburbanites. The former have taken off their coats long ago; the latter leave them on for the 20-30 minutes that it takes them to get to town. Another tell-tale sign of the early- morning long-distance commuter is the tin of energy drink – the espresso doppio of rural Poland – reached for as the train nears Warsaw. Urban sophisticates may be able to pop into the local Costa or Green Cafe Nero for an early flat-white or latte, but out in the sticks, it is not so easy. (One summer’s morning, I entered a rural petrol station west of Piaseczno in need of a large black coffee. I was shown a quarter-kilo brick of ground coffee on the grocery shelf. “Buy it, take it home and make it there yourself,” being the subliminal message.)
Beyond Radom
Some Koleje Mazowieckie trains from Warsaw will go as far as the railway junction town of Skarżysko-Kamienna. There are two services between Skarżysko-Kamienna and Warsaw in both directions (two to Warsaw early in the morning and two back to Skarżysko-Kamienna in the evening). I will briefly mention the line running down to this town too. And on the way, between Radom and Skarżysko-Kamienna, there’s Szydłowiec, famous for maintaining the highest unemployment rate in Poland. At the end of October 2023, it stood at 22.4%, five times higher than the national average (and over twice that of Radom, 16 times that of Warsaw). How is this possible? Many small Polish towns were built around single enterprises which collapsed with the economic transformation; the products produced were no longer competitive, so the factory (or in the case of Szydłowiec, quarry,) closed. But that was a quarter of a century ago; most of Poland has since picked itself up, not so Szydłowiec.
Skarżysko-Kamienna is the end of the line as far as Koleje Mazowieckie trains go. It is the train operator’s southernmost outpost and lies across the border in neighbouring Świętokrzyskie province. Like Bielsko-Biała or Konstancin-Jeziorna, it is a compound town, created by the joining together of Skarżysko and Kamienna into one municipal unit. Sitting astride a strategic railway junction, Skarżysko-Kamienna is notably wealthier than Szydłowiec. Beyond Skarżysko-Kamienna lies Kielce, Radom’s great rival, and thence southward; the rails continue onto Kraków and the mountains.
At the northern end of our line, some rush-hour Koleje Mazowieckie services continue beyond W-wa Wschodnia – east and south-east towards W-wa Rembertów, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Tłuszcz, Mrozy, Otwock or Pilawa, where these services terminate. These lines will not be covered here.
Mention will be given to the short branch line between W-wa Służewiec and Warsaw’s Chopin Airport stations, opened in 2012. There’s also the coal-train line that runs, unelectrified, from the sidings south of W-wa Okęcie to the power station at Siekierki; following the Radom line for a while, it swings off to the east just beyond Nowa Iwiczna. The horseshoe-shaped line passes through a siding at Konstancin-Jeziorna before turning north, running parallel to the Vistula until it reaches the coal-fired power station.
Further south, there’s the service to Góra Kalwaria, east of the Radom line south of Czachówek, towards the Vistula, calling at Czachówek Wschodni along the way. This is a fascinating line; it is a fragment of the 100-mile (160km) long Skierniewice-Łuków line built under Stalin as a strategic military railway bypassing Warsaw to the south, so that Soviet troops and equipment could be swiftly moved to the front line with NATO.
Approaching Radom, there’s an all-but abandoned spur branching off to the north-east of the main line to an industrial estate (and former coal mine), and between Radom Gołębiów and Radom Główny, the line merges for a while with the east-west
I will focus on what lies on either side of the tracks between Warsaw to Radom. Where there is drama, there will be drama. But I’m purposefully trying to be as precise as possible, avoiding the exaggeration that so often comes with storytelling, for two reasons. One is my responsibility to the future. I don't want readers in the future (who knows? A reincarnated me?) to read this and get the wrong impression. I want this account to be as objective as possible, while still remaining true to my personal, subjective, point of view. And secondly, I want to be precise. Poles are very prickly when it comes to how they are perceived by the world. Journalist and author, Edward Lucas, former Poland correspondent for The Economist once said that whenever he wrote something bad about Poland, Poles would criticise him for not bearing in mind the after-effects of the nation’s historical suffering. And whenever he wrote something good about Poland, Poles would criticise him for writing the piece from a luxury hotel room, ignorant of the day-to-day suffering of ordinary people. Tak źle, tak nie dobrze – ‘this bad, this no good’ – you can’t have it both ways. And so, I am setting out to be as accurate as I can be – me, a consciousness moving across the face of the earth, reporting to you as faithfully as I can, in the interests of the truth.
My dream is that one day, Poland will be regarded as a normal, ordinary, even slightly boring country. Until then…
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Central Warsaw's three main stations - plus one
The Radom line begins from Warsaw East (Warszawa Wschodnia), across the river from the city centre. It runs through central Warsaw, (Warszawa Śródmieście), and onto Warsaw West (Warszawa Zachodnia). The suburban line calls at three local Warsaw stations along the way (W-wa Stadion, W-wa Powiśle to the east of W-wa Śródmieście and W-wa Ochota to its west) before reaching W-wa Zachodnia. The InterCity line bypasses these four, stopping at Warsaw Central (Warszawa Centralna or Dworzec Centralny), which is located slightly west of W-wa Śródmieście.
And while the linia średnicowa (transversal line) is being modernised, the Radom trains start from Warszawa Gdańska, to the north of city centre, running down the orbital Warsaw line (passing W-wa Powązki, W-wa Koło, W-wa Młynów and W-wa Koło and the odd W-wa Zachodnia Peron 9) before returning to its usual route, south-west of W-wa Zachodnia. Complicated.
Note: W-wa, short for Warszawa, is the prefix for every one of the 62 railway stations within Warsaw's city limits. This would be like, for example, 'London Ealing Broadway' or 'London Kilburn High Road.'
I will start with a description of Warsaw East and work my way westwards.
Before we begin our 100km/60 mile journey from Warsaw to Radom at W-wa Wschodnia (Warsaw East), some railway geography concerning Poland’s capital.
Most capital cities are transportation hubs from which trunk road and rail routes radiate like spokes; Warsaw is no exception. The main railway lines head out from Warsaw in seven main directions: north-east (towards Białystok), east (to Terespol and the Belarusian border), south-east (to Lublin), south (to Radom, Kielce and Kraków), south-west (to Katowice, Wrocław and Kraków via the CMK – the High Speed line ), and west (to Poznań and on towards the German border) and north (to Gdańsk).
The city is crossed east-west by a four-track transversal railway line (linia średnicowa). It passes right under the heart of the city in a tunnel and then crosses the Vistula. A peripheral route skirts around the city centre to the north, but despite the modernisation of the transversal line, many trains still currently cross under Warsaw before making their way out of town towards their destinations.
Train routes to destinations lying south, south-west and west of Warsaw generally start from W-wa Wschodnia (Warsaw East), crossing the city, calling at either W-wa Centralna, the main InterCity station, or else at each of the four suburban stations in central Warsaw, before passing through W-wa Zachodnia (Warsaw West) on their way.
Similarly, train routes to destinations lying east, north and north-east and south-east of Warsaw start from W-wa Zachodnia, pass through central Warsaw and then onward via W-wa Wschodnia to their destinations. So trains heading for Gdańsk, Białystok, Terespol and Lublin will start at Zachodnia, while those heading for Poznań, Wrocław, Katowice and Radom will start at Wschodnia.
InterCity trains will use the fast pair of tracks between Wschodnia and Zachodnia via Centralna, while some suburban services still call at W-wa Stadion, W-wa Powiśle, W-wa Śródmieście and W-wa Ochota as they head west. The great name here for enthusiasts of railway station architecture is Arseniusz Romanowicz (1910-2008), who designed six of the seven stations along the line.
So let us then begin our travels, down the line to Radom!
Warsaw East (Warszawa Wschodnia)
Seven platforms, good waiting-room facilities on both sides of the station. There's a McDonald’s, a Biedronka supermarket (selling no alcohol); there’s a Costa Coffee and a few other food outlets; well-staffed and clean but with homeless people apparent. The seven platforms with their 14 tracks are exposed to the elements, with concrete canopies over the centre sections. There are no level-access lifts, ramps or escalators to any of the platforms.
W-wa Wschodnia underwent a comprehensive modernisation in the run-up to the UEFA 2012 Euro football championships. Before that, it used to be an exotic station, standing at the interface between the post-Soviet world and the EU. In its heyday in its former role, it reeked of cooking smells, urine and stale tobacco; it was full of touts and panhandlers, peoples of the East, mingling with frying-pan peddlers and kneeling beggars; chaotic signage using myriad garish fonts and a cacophony of adverts, much of which was in Cyrillic script. Romanowicz’s main hall, built between 1956-61, was gutted during the modernisation but the main structure remained, though entirely renovated.
Today, that exotic flavour of W-wa Wschodnia as Gateway to the East has all but gone; sanitised; standardised white-on-blue signage, digital displays – and serving a different clientele. Cheap air travel and even cheaper long-distance coaches have wooed many of the international travellers off the rails. Until the start of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it was mainly well-heeled Russians passing through, ones wary of air travel. International trains would pass through here on their way between Moscow and Nice, or Moscow and Paris. In the autumn of 2023, W-wa Wschodnia saw a new international service starting - to Lviv, but because of the difference in gauge, passengers have to change trains at Rava Ruskaya, having crossed the border into Ukraine at Hrebenne.
Outside, neat lawns, well-managed bus interchanges on both sides of the tracks - Kijowska to the north, Lubelska to the south, buses terminate at both. Indeed, one bus route, the 111, starts at one, does a huge loop around Warsaw's Praga Południe district, and ends up at the other, to return running the other way). Trams also ply Kijowska. Across the tramlines, facing W-wa Wschodni, lies Warsaw’s longest block of flats. Just one address (ulica Kijowska 11), it contains 430 homes. The building is over half a kilometre from one end to the other.
Warsaw Central - Warszawa Centralna
Warsaw West - Warszawa Zachodnia
Warszawa Stadion
Rebuilt to serve the new Stadion Narodowy (National Stadium – one of Poland’s four venues for the EUFA Euro 2012 finals), and acting as an interchange with Line 2 of Warsaw’s Metro, Warszawa Stadion is now far bigger and grander than the two modest platforms that existed here before the modernisation. I confess to never having visited the old W-wa Stadion, the first of the Warsaw stations to be designed by Romanowicz. It was opened in 1955 to serve the newly-completed Stadion X-Lecia. The original station building remains on the east side of the embankment. The refurbished station, opened in May 2012, is well laid-out, with good access, escalators and lifts, clear signage, electronic indicator boards and a full-length canopy over both platforms. Its red-and-white translucent wall panels mirror the stadium’s livery. Outside there are spacious car parks and well-laid out lawns beyond which lies a tram and bus interchange by Teatr Powszechny.
The size of the entire stadium complex is such that W-wa Stadion railway station is over one kilometre from the nearest entrance to the actual stadium, and 2km from the bus and tram stops servicing it from the south and east. Even changing from the commuter trains to the Stadion Narodowy Metro station requires a 200m walk from platform to platform.
After pulling out of W-wa Stadion station, the line soon crosses the Vistula. The right bank is an urban beach, with clean sand, and many hip bars popping up in summer. It is crowded on sunny days. Across the river, the left bank has a concrete boulevard, and is even better catered-for in bars and restaurants, though these are more formal than the laid-back establishments across the river. Looking out of the train window to the north, you can see the roofs of the Warsaw’s Old Town, and the Świętokrzyski and Śląsko-Dąbrowski bridges. To the south, the chimneys of Siekierki power station and Warsaw’s most beautiful bridge – Most Poniatowskiego. Once on the left bank, the railway remains on a viaduct above the Vistula’s flood plain.
Warszawa Powiśle
Looking down over the streets and parks (and the gardens of the Convent of the Sisters of Charity) in Warsaw’s Powiśle district, the train approaches W-wa Powiśle station. Designed by Arseniusz Romanowicz, opened in 1962, the station is architecturally remarkable with striking modernist canopies on the platforms and a ticket office and waiting room in a UFO-shaped building (which served as a trendy bar but closed during the pandemic). This is the low-level entrance; you climb two flights of steps to reach the platforms from the street. Yet at the western end of the platforms, the high-level entrance is down a flight of steps from the street. The high-level entrance has a functioning ticket office and waiting room, and there is a stair-lift (missing at the other low-level entrance, 350m away - a problem for anyone in a wheelchair). Across the fence to the north of the ‘down’ platform run the fast lines carrying the intercity trains between W-wa Centralna and W-wa Wschodnia.
W-wa Powiśle as it currently stands is due for the chop. The planned modernisation of the transversal line foresees its closure, with a new station, W-wa Nowy Świat, located further west by Rondo de Gaulle'a. This will be underground, and will be better located for Warsaw central business district. Serving the Vistula embankment will be a second new station, W-wa Solec, located between the river bank and the Wisłostrada expressway.
As its lifespan is limited (the new stations are planned to be completed by 2030) W-wa Powiśle has not had any meaningful upgrades. It does not have modern signage informing passengers about their next trains – yes, there are printed timetables posted at either end of both platforms, and a loudspeaker, but none of those reassuring electronic white-on-blue signs.
W-wa Powisle's two platform canopies are outstanding examples of Romanowicz's architecture - I hope they will not be demolished!
As soon as trains leave the western end of the platform at W-wa Powiśle, the line enters a tunnel. This is the tunel średnicowy – transversal tunnel – that crosses under the busiest parts of central Warsaw. The tunnel is 2.2km long, carrying the two suburban and two intercity lines in parallel. The former two call at W-wa Śródmieście, and the latter two at W-wa Centralna. Looking out of the train window in the tunnel you can see refuges for workmen at frequent intervals and emergency stairs leading up to street level. Our Radom-bound local train soon carries us into the next station…
Warszawa Śródmieście
The nearest you can get to the epicentre of Warsaw. This is an unusual station – it’s the only one on our line that’s underground, and the only one at which train doors open on both sides. W-wa Śródmieście has an island platform sandwiched between the tracks and two lateral platforms on either side. The three platforms are connected by a staircase but only at the west end of the platforms (which also serves to lead to a tunnel connecting this station with W-wa Centralna). The two lateral platforms lack an exit at their east end towards the interchange with Warsaw’s Metro (Metro Centrum is just 100m to the east). Nor does the island platform have exits from the middle of the station’s length. As a result of this inconvenient planning, passengers tend to use passing trains as stepping-stones from the island platform to the two lateral ones, or vice-versa. Something to be aware of when boarding a train here.
W-wa Śródmieście is also home to a thriving trade in old magazines. On offer at between a third and a quarter of their cover price, but typically weeks or months past their publication date. Passengers can obtain cheap reading matter for cash (no electronic transactions possible, no VAT, this is makulatura – officially paper destined for recycling – magazines coming off sale-or-return should have ended up in the pulping mill, but somehow they get diverted to have a second chance at catching a reader. If you’re looking for the June 2021 issue of Świat Motocykli, you are likely to find it at W-wa Śródmieście.
If you want good signage and up-to-the-minute train information, don’t look for it on the island platform. Both side platforms have extensive train info on old-school (analogue) split-flap boards manufactured by Pragotron of Czechoslovakia that have survived the modernisation. With each passing train, they update passengers with the serial flipping of letters clack-clack-clacking round to form the words spelling out the destination of the next train. These signs are now very rare, so enjoy their clack-clack-clacking here. You can check if your train is on time, or whether you can expect delays. Only rarely does the thing get stuck, sometimes with amusing results...
Once nicknamed ‘W-wa Smródmieście’ (‘Warsaw Stenchtown’), Śródmieście used to be a dimly-lit, malodorous place; homeless people would sleep in the tunnel and light fires in winter to keep warm. One such fire, in March 2003, spread to the station and darkened the station ceiling with soot, destroyed lighting and replaced the stench of human ordure with that of smoke and ashes. Since that incident, the station has been cleaned up several times; by the time of the 2012 football championships, it was entirely decent again, with another thorough renovation in 2023.
Smelly Polish railway stations were the result of train toilets that opened out directly onto the tracks. Despite signs prohibiting passengers from flushing the toilets while the train was standing at a station, many would, causing faecal matter and urine to end up right under the noses of people on the platforms. Cheap disinfectant was slopped onto the line between the tracks, adding to, rather than subtracting from, the overall olfactory experience.
Today, the unmodernised rolling stock has gone; the old stench has become a thing of the past.
After leaving W-wa Śródmieście, the train continues in the tunnel; to the right, you can catch glimpses between curtain walls and pillars of Warszawa Centralna station, after which the tracks converge; open air then beckons as the trains exits the tunnel and arrive at W-wa Ochota station.
Warszawa Ochota
Ochota – the posh district to the west of Warsaw’s city centre – is served by another Arseniusz Romanowicz station. Chronologically his second work along this line, PKP Ochota was opened in 1963. Not as flamboyant as Powiśle, it still has much moderne charm to it, glass and metal, angular, jutting. It is the least renovated of the six stations of central Warsaw. An island platform serves westbound and eastbound trains, the stairs and the west end of the platforms have been demolished and with them convenience of a direct exit to ul. Towarowa. The modernisation work ahead of Euro 2012 left this station untouched – and indeed, given the relative lack of importance of the station, being neither an interchange nor being close to the National Stadium, there was little reason to do more than add a lick of fresh paint here and there. Again, like W-wa Powiśle, poor signage at platform level, with only paper timetables, no electronic displays. No stairlifts or other disabled access is provided. Towards the western end of the ‘up’ platform there is a faded mural celebrating 150 years of railways in Warsaw; with each passing year it fades further still.
W-wa Ochota has six lines passing through; the two suburban and two intercity lines are joined by two lines for the WKD trains that terminate a few hundred metres east of the station at W-wa Śródmieście WKD. Now, WKD – Warszawskie Koleje Dojazdowe (Warsaw Commuter Railway) is a light-rail system running south-west out of Warsaw towards the dormitories of Pruszków, Milanówek and Grodzisk Mazowiecki. A separate system to the main line railways, WKD is a standard-gauge tram-like line, owned jointly by the Mazowsze province and the six municipalities through which it runs. It is integrated into Warsaw’s public transport network, and Warsaw season tickets are accepted on it. From a nomenclature point of view, there’s W-wa Ochota and W-wa Ochota WKD, right next to each other. But then there’s also the pair of W-wa Śródmieście and W-wa Śródmieście WKD, these two stations being separated by W-wa Centralna, around half a kilometre apart. (You can, however, get from one to the other without having to go up to street level).
Part Two – Warsaw’s Suburban Stations
As we leave Warszawa Zachodnia, we go over the points that take our line away from the main line headed west, and we swing south. We are now on the Radom line, Line No. 8. We are heading out of central Warsaw, but before we leave the city’s limits, we will stop at yet another seven stations, which will be covered in this section.
Warszawa Aleje Jerozolimskie
This station is ambiguously named, since Aleje Jerozolimskie, stretching over 10km from its easterly end by the Most Poniatowskiego bridge to the capital’s western borders, is one of Warsaw’s longest thoroughfares. Rising above the platforms to the south is the Mercedes-Benz office and showroom facility. Four platforms and five tracks serve the main line to Radom and the WKD, with a freight spur joining from the west. Level-access lifts and steps connect the viaduct carrying Al. Jerozolimskie over the railway line to the platforms.
This is the first station along our route without a booking hall or waiting room; tickets for Koleje Mazowieckie trains can be bought from a machine on the platform. This is the place for an important digression. If you board a train without a ticket you need to see the guard (kierownik pociągu) straight away, by going to the first compartment of the first car from the front. If there’s no guard - wait until they arrive. If you’ve boarded at a station with ticket facilities but did not buy one, you will be charged extra. However, if you got on at a station without facilities for buying one, you will just pay the normal fare.
Built as recently as 2006, W-wa Al. Jerozolimskie serves the needs of office workers – this stretch of the main road was developed in the 1990s, with a large number of commercial and retail properties. A simple station with a couple of shelters and some open-air seating.
Leaving the station, the WKD line crosses over the Radom line, swinging south-west, as the freight line from the south-west merges with the Radom line. By the time we reach the next station the number of tracks is down to two. Running south-east, parallel to ul. Instalatorów, an old-school industrial era district full of asbestos and lock-up garages, our line soon reaches W-wa Rakowiec.
W-wa Al. Jerozolimskie to W-wa Rakowiec
Warszawa Rakowiec
Serving a post-war industrial and administrative dormitory, W-wa Rakowiec sits alongside Aleja Krakowska, the old Kraków road leading south from Warsaw. SDM Rakowiec [check – photo of neon?] is a large housing estate, blocks of flats, what have you. Communist central planning – Warsaw suburb before the better thought-out housing districts of Ursynów and Gocław came into being. Built in the 1950s, it predates the two stations on either side of it by half a century. Still, no booking hall or waiting room, a simple halt without even a ticket machine. Platforms on either side of the tracks. The line runs through a cutting all the way to W-wa Żwirki i Wigury, like W-wa Al. Jerozolimskie, a new station.
Access to the station is from the main road at the eastern end of the platforms. For local residents living at the other end, this means a long trek. Some will be tempted to make their way down the grassy embankment and cross the tracks to reach the platform thus saving several minutes; this is dangerous and has led to fatal accidents.
Warszawa Żwirki i Wigury
The Alcock and Brown of Polish aviation history, Żwirko and Wigura, who died in a plane crash in 1932, were Poland’s foremost aeronautical pioneers, winning major international air races before their untimely end. Their names will live on – the main route from the centre of Warsaw to the city’s international airport is named after them. The road, ul. Żwirki i Wigury, runs over the railway line, yet it was only in 2002 [check] that the multiplicity of new offices, shared-services centres and business process outsourcing hubs that sprang up here created the need for a halt on the line. Again, like the two preceding stations, no waiting room nor booking hall. Again, side platforms on either side of the track. Again, only one entrance – this time from the west, off the main road. The line in the cutting swings south; ignored signs tell passengers not to cross the tracks under the bridge that carries ul. Żwirki i Wigury over the line. Passengers heading for Wiśniowy business park take the risk – rather than go up one flight of steps to the main road, wait for traffic lights, then go up more steps across a footbridge over ul. Żwirki i Wigury then down the steps at the other side – they simply cross the tracks. Dangerous, as express trains that are not stopping at these suburban stations come speeding round a blind curve. Still, it’s danger vs. inconvenience. Around the corner, still in the cutting, with allotments above on either side of the track and a footpath running parallel on the crest, we approach W-wa Służewiec – the part of Warsaw nicknamed ‘Mordor’.
Warszawa Służewiec
In the communist era, this was Służewiec Przemysłowy – industrial Służewiec. Home to a great many workshops, light industrial premises, factories, warehouses; cheaply built, brick and light blue-grey wood and metal with asbestos roofs. Swathes of this gave way to offices and new retail space. At first, Curtis Plaza on ul. Wołoska – in the early 1990s, Curtis-brand TVs were the rage. Across the road there was Domaniewska 41 – a development of four monster office blocks. At the time, employers didn’t worry about how their workers would get to work. They drove, left their cars everywhere, ploughing up grass verges, blocking one another’s exit – total traffic chaos. The offices multiplied. Służewiec was where the property developers wanted to build (land was cheap), and where tenants wanted to move. But with one tram line, a handful of buses and the railway line to Radom, public transport links were less than adequate and failed to keep up with development. By the early 2010s, the area had acquired the nickname ‘Mordor’ – after the Badlands of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
But slowly transport was getting better. The upgrade to the railway line occasioned by the Euro 2012 football championships meant that the airport would finally be getting a rail link, and passing through W-wa Służewiec, this would mean that the benighted workers would find their two trains an hour (peak times) augmented by a further four as Koleje Mazowieckie and SKM services to and from the airport passed through this station. Then, a further two SKM trains an hour were added. Fine if you’re coming to work from town; if you’re coming to work from Piaseczno and the south – no difference whatever.
Anyway, improvements there were. There is now a ticket machine, a decent canopy under which many can shelter from wind, rain and snow.
However, W-wa Służewiec has one huge problem – passenger access. Located as it is under the viaduct carrying ul. Marynarska – a very busy road – over it, to get to the north end of the island platform, you need to use stairs. For many passengers from Mordor, the idea of making a series of journeys up, down, over and across roads rather than merely hopping over the railway line, is unappealing. And so many cross the line, leading to a campaign from PKP PLK to stop this. Either in the form of billboards (blood on the tracks), smearing the platform-end barriers and platform ends themselves in tar, or simple prohibitions (‘Crossing of the tracks is forbidden’). But still they cross.
Worse at the south end. There is no access at all to the south end of the platform. For people working on ul. Postępu, getting to the station means either taking a 700m detour (a seven-minute walk) or crossing the track illegally and scrambling up to the platform.
Railway station planners need to experience what passengers are experiencing. They need to moderate the strict rules of health and safety on the line with common sense. When choosing between the risk of crossing a busy road (30 vehicles a minute) or a busy railway line (six trains an hour), the chances of being hit by a train are so much smaller. And yet they exist – they can be mitigated by checking carefully before crossing. Given that at other points along the line you are allowed to cross – at your own risk, after checking, this should be allowed here too. (More on this subject later.)
Shortly after leaving W-wa Służewiec, the two lines split into four, two head on south towards the next station, W-wa Okęcie, while two dive into a tunnel which turns west towards W-wa Lotnisko Chopina.
Opened (just in time) to bring Europe’s football supporters to Warsaw for Euro2012, the tunnel linking the Warsaw-Radom line to the airport was a controversial project. Given the line’s proximity – why not, said some critics – drive a narrower-bore tunnel from the airport terminal to W-wa Okęcie station and into it put a moving walkway or travelator – it’s less than a kilometre after all, and once at W-wa Okęcie, trains can take passengers both into town, or south towards Piaseczno and Radom. But no. For a vastly greater sum, a tunnel that allows only rail traffic from the airport toward Warsaw was built. It is, of course, a huge improvement over the previous public transport links from the airport – just a couple of buses and taxis.
Let’s take a quick trip through to the tunnel to see…
[Warszawa Lotnisko Chopina]
[Again, in brackets as not part of the Radom line, but closely enough associated with it for me to include it. A few hundred metres south of W-wa Służewiec station, trains bound for the airport cross over the points and dive into a tunnel, which swings round to the west and ends up at the buffers of a terminus station with an island platform. Charmless béton brut, unadorned by billboards or colour, the station is nothing but functional. A short tunnel connects the underground platforms with the airport terminal building. It’s good to be able to reach an international airport from the city centre by train!]
But back to the main line.
Assuming we’re heading south, our train passes a profusion of points; there is a (now redundant) spur running above ground to the airport, to allow for the transport of cisterns of aviation fuel from the refineries. We arrive at W-wa Okęcie…
Warszawa Okęcie
This station lies just 15 minutes’ walk from the airport departures terminal. If I’m not weighed down with baggage, I’ll usually alight here and walk rather than go one stop up the line and then wait for a train to the airport from Służewiec. It’s quicker, and good exercise. Unless you’re dragging a suitcase!
Okęcie serves the southern end of Służewiec Przemysłowy, and the increasing number of housing estates on the other side of ul. [check]. Modernised in 2015-17, the station retains an island-platform layout, with a long expanse of footbridges to get passengers over the tracks and then over the S79 expressway. With some shelter available, no booking hall or waiting room, it is more basic than the old station it replaced.
Beyond W-wa Okęcie is an extensive set of sidings. There are sidings for stabling passenger trains that terminate at W-wa Służewiec (in particular SKM units); there are separate sidings for the avgas cisterns that now no longer are hauled into the airport (the spur running from the main line to the airport fuel depot is being ripped up to make way for another business park). Today, the cisterns are unloaded into giant tanks to the east of the main line; from here the kerosene is pumped via an underground pipeline to the airport. Then there’s a spur that links the outside world’s rail network to the Warsaw Metro. From a junction just south of W-wa Okęcie, this line runs [check] km (miles) to the Kabaty Metro terminus, crossing over the busy ul. Puławska then disappearing into the Las Kabacki forest before entering the Metro depot.
However, the main part of the Okęcie sidings is about coal. It is here that the coal (and indeed biomass as well as bunker oil) that’s burnt to boil the water that drives the turbines that generates the capital’s electricity at Warsaw’s Siekierki power station is shipped through. Coming from the coalfields of Silesia, or from the Bogdanka colliery near Lublin, coal is brought up the line from the south and held at W-wa Okęcie to be taken to Siekierki. More on this later.
On the other side of the tracks is Okęcie airport. [Why not Chopina?] If you’re lucky, you’ll see a plane flying over your train as it comes in to land.
The name (and as we will see soon this is a common occurrence) does not reflect the station’s actual location. Consider this – Okęcie (before it became the original name for Warsaw’s airport in 1934) was and is the name of a part of the Warsaw district of Włochy. Yet the station is not in Okęcie, nor even in Włochy – it’s in Ursynów; it could serve the inhabitants of the new estates that have sprung up along ul. Kłobucka, half a kilometre away – but from that road there’s not a single sign pointing to the station – it may indeed be located on the other side of the airport in Okęcie itself for all the use it is for the people living near it.
Anyway, onward, further on down the line, past the end of the coal sidings, across the S2 expressway the road that links Warsaw with western Europe via Poznań and Berlin, and now the scenery starts to get countrified. Across the S2, we can see the Ferrari showroom, an odd location. Light industrial usage gives way to cabbage fields, carrot and potato are grown here too; we approach W-wa Dawidy. There are now three lines here – the ‘up’ and the ‘down’ Radom lines (electrified) are joined for a while by a non-electrified line from Okęcie sidings to Siekierki, which runs parallel as far as Nowa Iwiczna, where it swings east.
Warszawa Dawidy
This station was originally meant to be named W-wa Jeziorki (and the next station down, W-wa Jeziorki was to be named W-wa Dawidy). Indeed, both names are apt for both stations as Dawidy extends from one station to the next west of the tracks, while Jeziorki (Północne and Południowe) is the name given to the part of the district of Ursynów lying east of the tracks.
But it is as it is; when the two stations were built in the 1950s [check] that’s how they were named. Dawidy is today a simple halt with two side platforms astride the electrified lines with the coal-train line running to the east of the station. The old island platform was demolished as part of the 2015/17 modernisation programme. By ensuring that trains no longer have to slow down to accommodate the curve just ahead of the platform, they can run faster than before. The other big improvement that modernisation gave is the gated level crossing – the first level crossing of a public road on this line. This is ul. Baletowa, a busy road that before 2016 did not even boast a signal at this road crossing. Now it’s got barriers, bells, cameras, flashing lights and signs. However, the barriers come down a full three minutes before a train is due, causing big traffic hold-ups. Still, it’s much safer than before. W-wa Dawidy has no ticket machine or waiting room, just a few shelters worthy of a bus stop. From the north end of the platform, you can watch planes coming into land. And watch drivers take on the Paris-Dakar-like challenge of ul. Hołubcowa, one of a dwindling number of Warsaw roads that are not yet asphalted, and which, when wet, can bog down even 4x4s.
Next, on past fields on either side, with scattered houses of Jeziorki on the left. On the right, fields stretch out to Dawidy Bankowe on Warsaw’s border. Soon these scenes of rural tranquillity, less than 15km (10 miles) as the crow flies from central Warsaw, will be shattered by a three-lane highway, complete with interchange and service roads. This is to be the extension of the S7, linking the expressway junction south of the airport with Grójec. In these fields live hares and pheasants, while overhead soar skylarks, lapwings and marsh harriers; grey herons ducks, swans and gulls can also be seen, while goats and horses live on nearby farms. This is the closest countryside to town, and still within Warsaw’s boundaries. It is kept semi-rural by its proximity to the airport; zoning restrictions keep out industry, blocks of flats and houses over 12m high.
We approach the last station within the boundaries of Warsaw.
Warszawa Jeziorki
The last station before we leave Warsaw, like at W-wa Dawidy a former island platform here was demolished and side platforms installed on either side of a newly-straightened track. But here the platforms are staggered, with the ‘down’ platform to the north and the ‘up’ platform to the south of the newly-built viaduct that carries ul. Karczunkowska over the tracks. Like Dawidy, no ticket machine, nothing more than a handful of canopies. And the unelectrified coal line runs on past the station to its east. There is a gated level crossing at the south end of the ‘up’ platform – this is said to be temporary.
Now, just past the end of the platform at W-wa Jeziorki, there used to be a set of points that allowed southbound trains to slip off the coal line and into a special complex used for unloading aggregate (sand, gravel, roadstone etc). After running down to buffers at the far end, the train would reverse up a ramp until it reached a girder-and-concrete construction, like a bridge with one end. At the other were buffers; here the train would stop, doors on the bottom of the wagons would open, releasing the load into huge heaps below, to be taken away to construction sites by road. Locals said that on dry summer days, the dust rising from this place was intolerable. The aggregate ramp was demolished in 2008, the site sold to a Spanish real estate developer which went bankrupt in the economic crash the following year. The site stands empty; in November 2017 it was announced that a massive housing estate for 8,000 people would be built here, the flagship project of the government’s Mieszkanie+ programme to provide affordable housing. Good luck with that.
South of W-wa Jeziorki, west of the line, were dull uneventful fields (as Betjeman had it) - “fields ripe for development” – and then developers got there and started filling them up with houses. Houses – nothing else. No leisure complexes, no clinics, no schools, no retail centres – just houses, served by one small shop. And no proper roads, no bus routes, no footpaths to the station – indeed no extra station (it was mooted to build another halt here, called Mysiadło, between W-wa Jeziorki and Nowa Iwiczna). No station – just more and more houses. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.
Part Three – the Exurbs down to Warka
The border between what’s Warsaw and what’s not-Warsaw isn’t easy to spot from the train; to the east of the line, it’s a drainage ditch that runs under the tracks a few hundred metres south of the platform at W-wa Jeziorki. Beyond this lies Zone 2 of Warsaw’s public transport fare structure, although since September 2018, anyone with a Zone 1 season ticket can travel out to Zone 2 for free (though if you live in Zone 2, and you do not pay your taxes in Warsaw, you pay full Zone 1+2 money to enter Zone 1).
Nowa Iwiczna
The first station outside of Warsaw has much in common with the two preceding ones; one island platform pulled down and replaced with side platforms. No ticket machines or waiting room. As at W-wa Dawidy, a new gated level crossing on ul. Krasickiego frustrates drivers with its early closing barriers. Nowa Iwiczna station has a proper park+ride station.
But we are no longer within Warsaw; no ‘W-wa’ prefix to the station name. The land around is no longer being developed under the watchful gaze of the city hall. Nowa Iwiczna is one long street (ul. Krasickiego) with smaller streets running off to the north and south. Here live people who can’t quite afford to live in Warsaw proper (though probably could if only they’d ditch their cars and save the money they spend on financing and running them on urban real estate).
The appearance of level-crossing gates here in 2017 has upset local motorists. The barriers come down three minutes ahead of the train causing long traffic tailbacks on both sides of the tracks. Part of me is delighted – schadenfreude directed at the idle, polluting, congesting drivers – the other part mindful that maybe PKP PLK’s safety procedures are a touch too restrictive here.
The coal train runs parallel to the main line, but just south of Nowa Iwiczna, it (built originally in 1934 to serve the paper mill in Konstancin) curves off to the east, and runs past back gardens and fields, crossing ul. Puławska on a steel viaduct (rebuilt in 2019) and then continues, skirting the Las Kabacki forest to the south before eventually reaching sidings at Konstancin-Jeziorna. There’s a change of loco here, after which the coal trains – usually 40 wagons long – carry on to Siekierki, bending round to the north beyond Konstancin then heading parallel to the Vistula river until they reach the power station.
Without the coal train, we’re down to two lines again until we cross ul. Słoneczna, the main road heading west out of Piaseczno. This is a busy thoroughfare, and when the barriers come down on the level crossing, lengthy queues build up. There have long been barriers here and many of the vehicles waiting are through traffic.
Piaseczno, the Croydon of the East, is a dormitory town linked economically and by bus and train to Warsaw.
As we near Piaseczno, a goods-train siding emerges first on the east side of the line, then the west side; laden coal trains headed by electric locos often wait here before being let onto the main line to complete their run up to the Okęcie sidings. Piaseczno has a strong significance in logistics, with many warehouses located here serving the capital.
Piaseczno
At last a station with full facilities. An architecturally significant station building, with a ticket office, waiting room and buffet; an interchange with buses, a footbridge crossing the tracks and wheelchair lift at both ends.
Piaseczno is also home to a heritage narrow-gauge railway, which runs during the warmer months of the year from Piaseczno, across the mainline, and via Zalesie Dolne, Gołków and Runów towards Tarczyn, where the line stops today. It used to go on much further – to Grójec then on to Nowe Miasto nad Pilicą. Sadly, the short stump that’s left is used only for tourist trips in season. If you’re lucky, on a summer’s Sunday you may be able to see the narrow-gauge train, headed by a diesel loco (sadly, the Px48 steam engine that used to haul the excursion trains is no longer here), crossing the viaduct at the south end of Piaseczno (main-line) station.
South of Piaseczno there’s a change of scenery – fishponds and forests. The Radom line runs through sylvian scenery, good recreational land for the townsfolk, past Żabieniec (another level crossing), and then on to the last outpost of Warsaw’s commuter land – Zalesie Górne. Between the tall trees, posh villas.
Zalesie Górne
Before the war, the trains used to stop here at a halt – already the place was seen as an attractive place to live by the well-off, intellectuals and senior officials. This trend continued in communist days, many top party members chose to live here. Today, many of the villas have gone to seed somewhat, retired folk who can no longer keep the place looking nice (but still they must have an impressive car). The station itself has been modernised, with full-length canopies on either (side) platform and a booking hall/waiting room facility as well as ticket machine. As in Piaseczno, the station is a centre of social life. Youths wielding spray-cans make the place look untidy, giving the area around the station a somewhat shabby air. This is the last stop on the line where the economic draw of Warsaw can be clearly felt.
As the train heads on down the line from the station, the houses become sparser between the tall trees until they stop and the forest becomes pure forest. An invisible border has been crossed; we are now in działkaland – no longer houses in daily residential use, but rather weekend, summer houses, rarely visited in winter, but during summer weekends the little house on the działka is where urban Poles choose to be. I recall many years ago, a taxi driver taking me to the airport on a Saturday morning telling me that once he’s dropped me off, he’d be heading off to his działka for ‘browar, praska, grill’ – ‘a beer, papers, a barbecue’. Take the Radom train from Warsaw on a summer’s day and there will be plenty of passengers on their way to their działki, (think of the Russian concept of the dacha); they will be bringing food and supplies, gardening implements, fold-up bicycles, what have you.
Ustanówek
Another modernised post-war station that’s little more than a pair of staggered side platforms with a couple of canopied shelters with seating. At either end of the station – gated level crossings (the gates are now de rigeur and come as standard with the modernisation work. No ticket machine. A small general stores/grocery shop is at the southern end of the ‘up’ platform. Other than that, Ustanówek is quintessential działkaland, livelier at the weekend than during weekdays. I suspect that as Warsaw expands and the roads in and out become more blocked, and home-office work becomes more popular in the service sector, more and more Varsovians will move out to Ustanówek to live here the year round. Forests and rivers mean plenty of walks in clean country air. Further on south, there’s a large horse-riding establishment with plenty of horses grazing. Then the train crosses the Zielona river, we enter a forest and soon we’ll be approaching Czachówek.
Approaching Czachówek from the north is an interesting experience; the train is on an embankment; below on either side are pine trees – there’s the light shudder of points under the train wheels and a line runs off to the left, then more points and a line runs off to the rights; both are spurs linking the Warsaw-Radom line with the Łuków-Skierniewice line that passes underneath at right angles at just before the train enters Czachówek station. Now, because it sits on an important junction, Czachówek finds itself with no fewer than three railway stations.
Not so much a town but a group of villages (Gabryelin, Czarny Las, Bronisławów, Julianów and yes, Czachówek) that sit around the junction of two railway lines. It is here that the Warsaw-Radom line crosses over the Łuków-Skierniewice line – a relic of Stalinist military planning. The second-largest infrastructure project of the First Six-Year Plan, Stalin wanted a strategic east-west railway line that would bypass Warsaw – which he considered a hotbed of saboteurs and agents of the West. This line runs through countryside with a low population density; other than Tarczyn and Grójec, it doesn’t see many proper towns along the way, so the line was never used much by passenger trains. An attempt to run a service from Pilawa to Warsaw via Czachówek was abandoned after a year; today a passenger service runs from Góra Kalwaria to Warsaw via Czachówek Wschodni, no longer crossing the Vistula. The line, however, is used regularly by freight trains – coal from Bogdanka to the power stations of Warsaw, oil to Okęcie airport, and containers full of Chinese consumer goods bound for the markets of Europe.
The junction is a full four-way junction with single-track connecting spurs (north-to-east/east-to-north; east-to-south/south-to-east; south-to-west/west-to-south; west-to-north/north-to-west) between the two twin-track main lines south-to-north/north-to-south and west-to-east/ east-to-west. Four signal boxes guard the entries from each direction. Czachówek used to have four stations – Środkowy (central); Górny (upper); Wschodni (east) and Południowy (south). Środkowy has gone – the building was demolished shortly after passenger services ceased to run between Łuków and Skierniewice.
The two spurs to the north and the one to the south-east run through forests, the spur on the south-west side runs through the village; the sight of a train of cisterns rumbling across a quiet village street is rare and quite special!
Czachówek Górny
Situated on an embankment just south of the viaducts that carry the two tracks of the Radom line over the Łuków-Skierniewice line, Czachówek Górny [Upper Czachówek – or even Czachówek High-Level] consists of two parallel side platforms. Fully modernised in 2016-17, the station has wheelchair ramps on both sides, a few canopies; no ticket office. An interesting place to wait for a train; you can hear other trains around you, and often you won’t know where they are or where they are heading – there are many possible combinations. From east to north? From west to east? The ones taking the spurs north are invisible from the station as they run through forests, yet you can clearly hear them. Looking south, on either side of the tracks you can see the southern spurs drawing closer to the junction that lies between Czachówek Górny and Czachówek Południowy.
The countryside around Czachówek is entirely rural; no light industrial units, no warehouses, no food processing plants. Between Czachówek Górny and Czachówek Południowy, the tracks from both southern spurs converge; as is often the case the road names tell you that the railway is close at hand (ul. Dworcowa on the west, ul. Kolejowa on the east side), and so the tracks run into Czachówek Południowy – a station that serves as a start-point/destination for some rush-hour services into Warsaw. It’s worth mentioning here the Góra Kalwaria service. It leaves the Warsaw-Radom line via the north-to-east spur, joining the Łukow-Skierniewice line. Shortly after it does so, it calls at Czachówek Wschodni, and then runs east, seven kilometres through open farmland and forest to Góra Kalwaria, a town of 12,000 situated on a hill overlooking the Vistula.
Czachówek Południowy
A station whose location is the reason for its importance, rather than the area it serves. At the southern apex of the ‘Czachówek diamond’. There is a platform for terminating commuter services (to the north of the main platforms); the 2016/17 modernisation saw the installation of a tunnel under the line with wheelchair lifts; this proved to be problematic as the tunnel often floods and the wheelchair lifts were not put into use. To facilitate passenger access from the south of the station, a temporary solution was hurriedly put together – a ramp made of old wooden sleepers. This will remain in place until the lifts are working. My guess is that even when they are working, passengers wanting to reach the station from the south will cross the tracks and scramble up the platform rather than walk 250m (a three-minute walk) to reach the platform via the tunnel. There is a ticket machine here, but no waiting room.
As the train pulls out of Czachówek Południowy, we cross a level crossing, dwellings give way to permanently boggy marshlands, the spill-waters of the river Czarna unfit for agriculture or recreation, that reach down to the edge of Sułkowice. It is here that the first phase of the Radom line modernisation ends, and the second (stretching down to Warka) begins. So far (to late 2018) all the stations mentioned above have new platforms, those to the south are about to be demolished and new ones installed. The train suddenly begins to bounce and swing as we leave the modernised track and take to the old rails; this boggy stretch does not make for a smooth ride.
Sułkowice
Home of Poland’s police-dog training school, Sułkowice is a small village of a thousand souls where the railway did not stop until the late 1950s, when a proper waiting room and ticket office (well, small hut) appeared to serve the island platform serving both tracks. At the north end, there’s a level crossing and the official, correct, safe access to the platform. At the south end, locals have piled some bricks and planks across the drainage ditch to fashion an unofficial way up to the platform – again, to save a 250m (three-minute) walk, doing it officially. As we pass Sułkowice, we enter Orchardland – Europe’s biggest apple-growing district.
20 July 2014
At Sułkowice, the next station south of Czachówek, I popped by for a baguette to go with my excellent selection of smoked meats, and a newspaper. The small village shop was crowded, though it was not yet seven am. Lots of building workers in overalls; in the car park were several pickup trucks with crew cabs. On the platform of Sułkowice station there were about 15 people waiting for the train to Warsaw. Things looked busy - there was still evidence of the old ways - under an apple tree across the road from the shop, Pan Heniek, Pan Ziutek and a friend who looked decidedly worse for wear were enjoying a round of early-morning refreshments and commenting on local events using a loud stream of expletives. Other than this trio of layabouts, everyone else at Sułkowice looked purposeful and was getting on with it.
The line goes under a viaduct carrying DK50 – Warsaw’s de facto southern ring road, just one lane in each direction, yet it is often solid with trucks running between the countries of the former Soviet Union and Western Europe. A dangerous road; many car drivers are tempted to overtake the long strings of TIR traffic. Still, on the tracks all is well; once under the DK50, houses give way to solid orchards, one after the other, best seen in blossom-time (late April) and when the trees are full of ripe fruit (September).
A level crossing, barriers down, a handful of cars waiting with WGR number plates telling us we’re in Grójec poviat, Poland’s most prosperous rural district. The train pulls into Chynów.
Chynów
Unlike most of the stations along this stretch, this was already existing before WW2, one of the five original stations between Warsaw and Radom. Chynów’s island platform will be replaced by staggered side platforms. The station had a goods sidings for goods – ballast was being stored here in anticipation of the track-bed modernisation, along with concrete sleepers and (lying between the tracks on the ‘up’ line) lengths of new rail. Since then, the sidings have been lifted and the whole area cleaned up. Chynów has a station building, with a waiting room and ticket office – when closed, there’s a ticket machine outside. Leaving Chynów, we pass a level crossing, and on the left, we can see a punkt skupu – where apples are collected and bought by wholesalers. During the apple-picking, we can see trucks, many with trailers, laden high with fruit, destined for processing into juice or pie-filling. Chynów is a busy place; a few działki here and there, but it’s mainly orchards, and the people who tend them and live from them.
Further on, the line enters a forest. An ungated, unguarded level crossing (the first one along the line) takes an unasphalted road (ul. Spokojna) over the tracks. As the forest thins out, another ungated crossing takes a grassy farm-track crosses the rails. Soon the train slows as we approach
Krężel
The first station (or more accurately, halt) on the line that seems to be located in the middle of nowhere. A scattering of houses and farmyards, the village of Krężel (pop. 230) is too small to host a shop.
As I write, Kręzel is in exactly the same condition as W-wa Dawidy, W-wa Jeziorki and Nowa Iwiczna stations were prior to modernisation; an island platform that forces 'down' trains to slow down significantly to swing round it, if they're not stopping here. The platform is in poor condition. All this will change, as it has up the line nearer to Warsaw. Krężel station (like Sułkowice) has a covered waiting area to the east of the 'down' line. All will change; no doubt work will take around 18 months-two years considering how long work on the W-wa Okęcie to Czachówek Południowy took. In stages, over the years, I have walked all the way alongside the track from W-wa Służwiec to Krężel; beyond Krężel my knowledge of the Warsaw-Radom line is not so intimate as to this point.
Krężel to Michalczew (125m asl): 3.39km.
Michalczew
A station with a proper station building (though used only as a waiting room), the importance of Michalczew is its electricity substation, which provides power for this whole stretch of the line. Again, an island platform has been replaced by staggered two lateral platforms. The original 1934 station building will remain, though with a new lick of paint.
Michalczew to Gośniewice (125m asl): 3.39km.
Gośniewice
Quintessential rural halt lacking asphalted access from either side of the track. Extremely difficult to find (looking for it, I rode past it several times on my motorbike before narrowing it down by a process of elimination, rather than because of any signage). The station was built and opened in 1973, with two low platforms on either side of the tracks, unlike the majority of stations along the line that were originally built with island platforms. Surrounded by fields and orchards, this is the least-used station on the stretch from Warsaw to Warka. Typically just a few passengers alight or board here - although the station is busier during the apple-picking season. The modernisation will result in new, staggered platforms. The new ‘up’ platform is to the south of the level crossing that takes a sandy track from a road of tertiary importance into fields and a forest in which it peters out. The first station down the line that puts me in mind of Edward Thomas’s quintessentially English verse, Adlestrop.
Gośniewice to Warka (116m asl): 4.37km.
Warka
Nearly 2km from the centre of this growing town of 12,000, known for brewing and apple-processing, Warka station was one of the original buildings built along with the line in 1934. Several sidings on either side of the main lines, the two platforms connected by an underground passage with ramps at either side (as at Czachówek Południowy and Chynów). This station, like Piaseczno, is served by InterCity trains on their way from Warsaw to Kielce and Kraków.
Warka Miasta
The modernisation of the line gave PLK the opportunity to build another station, nearer to Warka’s centre; called Warka Miasto (‘Warka Town’), it is within walking distance of far more potential railway users than the main Warka station.
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