For more than five years now, Croatia has been increasingly focusing on making train travel free for children, schoolchildren and older people. The offer, which began as a temporary pilot project, has led to a sharp increase in passenger numbers. Now the government has expanded the programme once again: since the beginning of the year, people with disabilities have also been able to use public rail transport free of charge.
Today, ten times more schoolchildren use public transport than five years ago.
A free train programme originally started about five years ago as a pilot project and was not intended to last longer than 15 months. The Croatian government introduced free public transport for schoolchildren in autumn 2021. The aim was to improve connections to remote communities and stop the exodus from small villages. Schoolchildren were given access to all the public transport they needed for their journey to school, similar to the free school transport in Austria. The result was an almost tenfold increase in the number of regular users. According to the Croatian news portals portal.hr and poravski.hr, 7,000 schoolchildren typically used public transport to get to school in 2020, but today that number has risen to 60,000.
In the years that followed, the Croatian government extended the offer to more and more sections of the population. By 2025, around 150,000 pensioners were travelling free of charge on the rail network. Students have been benefiting from free train travel since January 2024 and use public transport primarily to commute between their homes and universities. Since 2026, people with disabilities have also been able to travel by train for free as often as they want. The only requirement is a national or European disability card.
Tourism is also becoming greener: trains between Pula and Zagreb are running again
In addition, the train connection between Pula and Zagreb was resumed in autumn 2025 after a three-decade hiatus. The new trains are direct connections, with a journey time of around seven hours. According to Željko Ukić, head of the Croatian railway company HŽ Passenger Transport, the focus here is also on easy accessibility:
„We need to develop the habit of using this route and make it accessible to citizens in order to connect Istria with the rest of Croatia.“
In addition, it is also about improving connections with neighbouring countries. For example, cooperation with Slovenian Railways is to be strengthened in order to be able to offer more train connections in the coming years.
„I am convinced that cooperation with my colleagues at Slovenske železnice (the Slovenian railway company, note) will lead to the introduction of additional trains on various routes in the future,“says Croatian railway chief Ukić.
The expansion of rail transport and the revitalisation of the Pula-Zagreb route are not only beneficial for the Croatian and Slovenian populations. It also has positive effects on sustainable tourism.
Nevertheless, the railway in Croatia is slow and poorly developed
Croatia’s rail network continues to struggle with a variety of problems. Above all, the infrastructure is considered outdated. In addition, Croatia’s national railway company split into four parts in 2012. According to experts such as Nikolina Rajković from the Croatian Institute for Political Ecology, this division made the sector more vulnerable to further liberalisation and privatisation. Large international providers could more easily put pressure on national operators. The decades-long lack of modernisation is also reflected in the speed of the trains. According to Rajković, the average speed limits are only around 40-60 km/h. Express trains travelling at 140-160 km/h, on the other hand, are only possible on 4 per cent of the routes.
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