About this journey

Skopje station departs the journey from a structure unlike most in the region: a Brutalist concrete platform bridge 2 kilometres long carrying 10 tracks, completed in 1981 as part of the reconstruction that followed the earthquake of 26 July 1963. The original station clock, stopped at 5:17 at the moment of that earthquake, is now preserved in the Museum of the City of Skopje. Makedonski Železnici Infrastruktura renovated the station between 2014 and 2015 at a cost of 2.5 million euros.

The line south from Skopje toward Veles forms part of Corridor X, the principal north–south route linking Niš in Serbia to the port of Thessaloniki in Greece. It was opened in 1873 by Chemins de fer Orientaux, when both Skopje and Veles lay within the Ottoman Empire, and electrified in 1978. After North Macedonia's independence in 1991, all infrastructure transferred from Yugoslav Railways to Makedonski Železnici. Veles station — the oldest in present-day North Macedonia, first opened on 9 April 1873 — serves as a railway junction where lines diverge toward Bitola, Gevgelija, and Kocani, and has ten tracks of its own. The journey covers 50.9 km between the two stations, arriving at a terminus whose nineteenth-century origins stand in quiet contrast to the modernist concrete from which the ride began.