Interrailing in North Macedonia is a scam - Why you should buy a train ticket instead

Last year I saw a deal for an Interrail pass for a country I knew basically nothing about, called North Macedonia. It looked like the railway network was decent judging by the website, they had some very cool looking old trains, and the pass was only €35, which seemed like a great deal. I did try and find some information from other people who'd used the pass, and I couldn't find anyone talking about it. After having used the pass, I wanted to share some information that I thought could be helpful to fellow travellers who might be considering the pass.

The interrail website is extremely misleading about North Macedonia's rail network

If you looked at the map on the interrail website, you might think that North Macedonia had a pretty good rail network! It covers off the main tourist spots (Skopje, Bitola, Kicevo and Ohrid) after all, and it looks like there are some cool connections between cities - for example getting between Kicevo and Prilip is pretty handy. 

The problem is that this map doesn't represent North Macedonia's rail network at all, which is very obviously misleading. There's no connection between Ohrid and Kicevo, and that hasn't been the case since the old Narrow-Gauge line was closed down in the 1960s. As far as I can tell, there has never been a rail link between Ohrid and Bitola, or between Prilep and Kicevo. They also seem to have drawn the connections in a weird way that implies that you could, for example, travel from tetovo to prilep without going via Veles and Scopje.

 

The map must represent something, after all why else would there be parts of the map that are all wiggly instead of drawing a direct line? I had a theory that it was coach routes, but the conditions for the interrail ticket don't mention coaches at all, and the national railway company doesn't run any coaches so that theory doesn't make much sense. I did ask someone from Interrail Support about this and they told me to check in with MZT, the state-operated company that runs the trains. But this is clearly interrail's map not MZT's so it felt like I just got fobbed off.

 

I've made my own version of the map, showing what North Macedonia's network actually looks like. Every train journey operates either to or from Skopje, the capital city of North Macedonia. Timetables are available from the North Macedonian Railways website, but they're not available in English so you'll need to use Google Translate. I get the impression that the website isn't always kept up to date, and on my journey I think I remember some of the train times being slightly different to what's on the website, so I recommend taking a trip to the train station and looking at the paper timetables the day before just in case.

In general, frequency on the line from Skopje to Veles is is pretty good, and beyond that all other lines get two or three trains per day each way.

The lines in red are that were closed as of travelling and as of writing. Line closures seem to be pretty long-term in North Macedonia, and so it's likely that this diagram will remain correct for the rest of the year. Unfortunately rail replacement buses are not a thing, and so your interrail ticket will not be valid for any form of travel to places with closed lines - you will just need to buy a coach ticket from a private operator. This is slightly more understandable than just making up railway lines but 

The interrail pass

At time of writing the cheapest North Macedonia Interrail pass is on sale for €38, but costs €50 normally. This pass will let you travel for 3 days within a month. There are two core problems with this pass:

• 3 days of travel really only works for a round trip, which you can't really do on North Macedonia's railway network.
• It would be nigh on impossible to spend €38 on train travel in North Macedonia even if you were trying really hard.

I tried really quite hard to find a way to make use of my full 3 days of travel, but I really couldn't find a way to do it practically whilst going to the places that I wanted to go. A lot of the places that the train goes to simply aren't very touristy. As a tourist, the main places I wanted to visit were Skopje, Bitola, and Ohrid. I could really only justify taking the train between Skopje and Bitola, as there is no train between Bitola and Ohrid. To get from Ohrid to Skopje I could have taken the Coach to Bitola, and then took the train from Bitola to Skopje. However, it just made a lot more sense to take a direct coach from Ohrid to Skopje.

 

Cost is the biggest problem with the interrail pass, and one that I don't think you'd really have any idea of unless you knew how much a ticket costs. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find any fare information online, but I do have a way of figuring it out (roughly).

Here is a train ticket that I found, and kept as a souvenir. This ticket goes from Prilep to Vasharejca, a distance of 33km, and costs 70 Macedonian Denars, roughly €1.14 at time of writing. This works out at a whopping 0.0345 recurring euros per km. As per this very cool web 1.0 website the distance from Skopje - Veles - Bitola is 178km, putting our rough cost for a ticket on one of the longest journeys in the country at €6.49. You would need to travel a smidge over 1013 km to make the €35 for an interrail ticket worth it, which seems nigh-on impossible when there's only 925km of track in the entire country. Admittedly, all of this is based off of an estimate, my estimate would need to be wildly off for an interrail pass to be even remotely worth it.

 

I'd imagine first class would be an even worse deal, especially as neither of the trains I took had a first class area. Apparently some of the old Yugoslav trains do have one, but again I didn't see any so it seems very unlikely that you'd get a chance to use the first class pass.

 

The interrail app is also not at all set up for North Macedonia at all. I remember that you had to lie to the interrail app in order to see your pass. You need to tell the app where you're going before you can use the pass, but none of the stations you can select are in north macedonia. I put my itinerary as being 

 

Using the interrail pass was fine. One conductor was kind of confused but just kind of seemed to trust me about the ticket, and another one had to check with his supervisor. I don't remember ever getting my ticket scanned, as the tickets in north macedonia are generally paper. I get the impression that basically nobody uses the interrail pass at all, but the pass didn't cause me any issues.

 

Buying paper tickets has to be done in person, and in general the railway staff, whilst friendly, didn't speak great English (which is completely understandable, I didn't speak great Macedonian). Really, this is the only reason I can imagine the interrail pass being useful, as it is the only way to buy a ticket online in your preferred language.

The train experience

One of the trains at Skopje station.

As far as I saw, the only passenger trains that run on the North Macedonian railway are these relatively new chinese trains purchased by MZT in 2015. I didn't see any other trains, which was kind of gutting as I was very excited to see some old Yugoslav trains. The new trains are kind of boring - it's the kind of train you'd see a lot of on regional rail lines in europe.

The interior of the train.

Inside they're a bit grungy, but not untolerably dirty. I remember there being crumbs on the tray table and between the seats, floor didn't look like it'd been cleaned in a while, that sort of thing. On one of the trains I used, one of the bathrooms had a broken door and absolutely stunk. Whilst that might have been a one-off, they didn't strike me as particularly well-maintained.

The seating is in a two-by-two configuration, and it's comfy enough. It's like a slightly more padded version of what you'd find in a bus. The train is surprisingly open and spacious, so it doesn't feel super claustrophobic, unlike a coach.

All train announcements are in Macedonian only, including those regarding delays. As a result you need to keep a very close eye on where you are to avoid missing your station, and it's entirely possible you might miss other important announcements.

Delays seem to be very common - my first train journey it took us 2 hours to get out of Skopje and was delayed by 4 hours overall, and my second train journey was delayed by an hour.

The delays only put a slight dampner on the extremely beautiful scenery. There's a few parts of the journey that aren't particularly special, but there's a part of the journey that winds through the mountains after Veles that was genuinely magical. You pass through all these tiny villiages which are reliant on the train to get around, and there are some surprisingly beautiful old stations along the way, although many look like they're falling into disrepair.

A view from the window of the train.

Neither of the trains I took were very busy at all, and so if you want the best view you should have no trouble sitting somewhere with free seats opposite. 

Summary 

North Macedonia is a beautiful country and, I would definitely recommend visiting. It's probably worth taking the train if you're travelling somewhere that has a direct train connection. However, the trains are so cheap, and the railway network so limited, that I don't think it would ever be possible to get enough value out of the interrail pass to make it worthwhile. Instead, it makes much more sense to just buy a ticket, even if the language barrier might make it difficult.