About this journey

Šid station sits at a railway junction where lines branch towards Tovarnik, Kukujevci-Erdevik, and Sremska Rača, marking it as the western gateway to Serbia on Railway line 1 — the 120-kilometre Belgrade–Šid railway that connects Belgrade with the Croatian network and, beyond it, the city of Zagreb.

The line is electrified and mostly double-tracked, a status it has held since 1970 when the Zagreb–Belgrade corridor received electric traction for the first time in Serbia. Its entire route follows the Sava river valley, and that river remains a constant presence throughout the journey. As part of Pan-European Corridor X — running from Salzburg and Ljubljana towards Skopje and Thessaloniki — this is one of the continent's principal freight and passenger arteries, and from 1919 to 1977 it carried the Orient Express itself.

The journey ends at Belgrade Center station, known as Prokop, which took over as the city's main rail terminus in 2016 after the historic Belgrade Main Railway Station closed on 1 July 2018. That older station, built between 1882 and 1885 to designs by architect Dragutin Milutinović, had seen its first departure on 1 September 1884. The Stadler Flirt 413 that covers the route today represents a very different era from those inaugural royal carriages, yet the valley and the corridor beneath it remain unchanged.