@oldman,
@mugam4: rather amusingly, "things have come full circle". Your quotes about the 1982 venture, are from myself: writing on Rob Dickinson's "International Steam Pages" about my doings then in Yugoslavia ! My query here was initially: because of my entertaining ideas of submitting an additional piece to those "International Steam Pages", about a comical aspect of that night-time Karlovac -- Sisak bash. It just occurred to me to try to find out whether -- with things maybe becoming a little bit better in that tragic part of the world -- the line concerned, long dormant or worse, might have come back to life. Answer overwhelmingly:
pace a little bit at the eastern end, no.
Shienenbus was enough, I'm very familiar with those, a sort of German pacer. They had battery versions as well as I recall, but a quick look suggests JZ had only diesel ones.
I being aged and an obscurantist -- pacers and stuff, mean rather little to me: Yugoslav sinobuses recalled and recall to me, British Railways' 1950s / 60s four-wheel diesel railbuses (which I gather had in that era, numerous close "cousins" in both Germanies: weren't some BR railbuses, German-made?). JZ's way seemed to be, to have lots of these four-wheel diesel jobs. They were used in abundance, on branch-line and local services; tended to run in multiple -- often, "very-multiple": for public consumption, this business always referred to just as "sinobus". In my small experience of JZ, I never encountered one of these vehicles running singly: smallest "multiple" number thereof which ever came my way, was two.
I have found some references to the possible reopening of the 10km section from Sisak-Caprag to Petrinja, which is in a built-up area, quite different from most of the route. It is part of the network (although out of use) and appears in HZ Infrastruktura documents as route L210. There are occasional press reports, with HZ saying they don't have the funds. This part of the line can be clearly followed on Google Maps, with quite a lot of track still there.
The rest of the line is, I think, history.
Thanks. As they say up north, "owt's better'n nowt". (There must be a Serbo-Croat equivalent.)
Given HZ have closed a few more minor bits and pieces to save money on maintenance I don't think it will re-open, at least not anytime soon.
The Croatian section of the Sarajevo-Ploče line is now closed on the Croatian side despite the Croatians having upgraded their side of the line not long before the Bosnians did! Now swish Talgos out of Sarajevo run no further than the border station of Capljina.
These former-Yugoslavs, they crazy
!
I drove east from Karlovac one afternoon about 11 years ago. The area just outside the town still had much damage from the war, which had been, what, 18 years or so previously at the time.
I also visited a S African couple who had bought a house near Glina. They said that in their house search they found homes where you could see the images on the walls of people who had been shot in their own homes. I think the victims were Serbs, murdered by Croat Ustashe. (Of course, the Serbs were just as brutal in eastern Croatia and BiH.)
I can't remember seeing any railway - but I could have just forgotten.
At the risk of coming across as hard-hearted: from everything that I hear, South Africa is a highly violence-bedevilled country -- though from reasons not identically the same, as re former Yugoslavia. One hopes that the S.A. couple of your acquaintance had not been so naive as to, envisagedly, buy a country retreat in a part of Europe where all was sweetness and light and tranquility (maybe "everything's relative")...
One gets the picture that in those horrific years, "the 'tribes' were all at it" -- except perhaps the Slovenes; who got their country out of Yugoslavia with minimal bloodshed -- and who are generally reckoned as a rather "different breed of cat": even their language differs significantly from Serbo-Croat.
I feel the whole thing to be terribly sad: I liked Yugoslavia, in my small experience of it. Notoriously "gricers' hell" -- one either accommodated oneself to the pathological hostility to rail photography; or didn't go there at all, or else "switched off for the duration" from anything railway-related. For me -- interestingly "less-developed" -- easy-on-the-eye countryside, sometimes beautiful / spectacular (though the north-east of the country-as-was, drearily low-lying and flat) -- burgeoning wildlife -- the inhabitants, with various likeable traits among their less-so same. I was perhaps lucky -- many reports pre-country's break-up (these, from various sources -- railway enthusiasts re things other than anti-photter-mania; and "normal non-railfan" folk) tell of unpleasant dealings with the locals. I found them in the main not effusively friendly; but perfectly OK. I feel that even obnoxious people, don't deserve what has happened there in recent decades...