Every year, in August, on the first day of Sunday, Bulgaria celebrates the Railway Worker’s Day, an event dating back from 1950. This festive day is enriched by the celebration of 125 years since the establishment of Bulgarian Railways, the State Railways, Balgarski Darzhavni Zheleznitsi (BDZ), which was set up on August 10, 1885. The month of August has several important connotations in the railway history of Bulgaria. The Caribrod-Sofia-Vakarel line was inaugurated on the 1st of August 1888. It was the first international traffic line and the first designed and built by Bulgarian engineers and companies with 100% domestic capital.
The Railway Law, stipulating the establishment of a railway transport company, was adopted by the Bulgarian National Assembly on the 31st of January 1885. However, Bulgaria’s railway history began earlier, in 1864, when the Ottoman Empire, which at that time included Bulgaria, decided to build the Ruse-Varna railway. The line was finalized in 1866 by a British consortium which included the company of a British politician, William Gladstone, and that of the Barkley brothers, specialized in civil engineering. Services on the Ruse-Varna line were launched on November 7, 1866. The Bulgarian State bought back the line from the British concession on August 10, 1888, when the first Bulgarian line became state property.
Many key personalities in the Bulgarian history came from the railway sector, among them famous political men who participated in the country’s freedom movement and in the construction of modern Bulgaria, such as Todor Kableskov, manager of Belovo train station, Ilarion Dragostinov, telegraph operator at Ruse railway station, Zahari Stojanov, former shunting locomotive driver at Simeonovgrad railway station and Georgi Ikonomov, shunting locomotive driver at Edirne or Nikola Vapcarov, father of the modern Bulgarian poetry, who worked as a stoker at the locomotive depot in Sofia for two years.
In the 19th century, railway stations became the centre of social meetings for Bulgarian citizens, these events being immortalised in the epoch’s literature and art. This custom disappeared after the introduction of the waiting tickets which had to be bought before entering the station. The first independent body responsible with the railway system management, the Ministry of Railways, Posts and Telegraphs, was established in 1912. The first railway school in the country was set up in 1922. The first railway line was electrified in 1963, Sofia-Plovdiv, services on the first double line in Bulgaria, Sindel-Varna, being inaugurated a year later. The first rail-ferry services were launched in 1978, on the Varna-Ilichevsk route in Ukraine. A key event in the BDZ history is the company’s separation on January 1, 2002, into two companies, the railway operator BDZ EAD and the infrastructure manager Nacionalna Kompania Zelezopatna Infrastruktura (NKZI).
by Alin Lupulescu
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