Train travel is not particularly popular in Croatia. This does not prevent Deutsche Bahn from looking for train drivers there to work from home.

Croatian train drivers are especially good at honking Photo: Davor Javorovic/Picture Alliance

While the train drivers here are on strike, in Croatia they continue to honk. Every cow town where the train driver meets a cousin or drinking buddy is greeted with a trumpet. The closer the driver gets to his home region, the more often he honks and, towards the end of the journey, does not stop at all.

Although you can walk alongside the train for many kilometers, it moves slowly between fantastic natural wonders and desolate industrial and logistical landscapes. The machinist continues to present himself as a pioneer of electrification.

Today it is mostly famous for the fact that it still exists and runs museum-worthy diesel locomotives on faltering single-track routes through the Karst, although outside the tourist season there is hardly anyone on the trains.

Deutsche Bahn now recruits these skilled workers precisely here. “We are looking for train drivers in Croatia,” announces the DB in Germany and even offers a “special bonus of 2,000 euros” for relevant information.

One, well, two railway lines

That's really fun. For all kinds of reasons:

1. Croatia has a whole zoo of diacritics in its ABC, there is even a letter with a character in the middle (the “đ” in “strojovođa”, train driver in Croatian). However, there are no gender symbols like the one in “Train Drivers.”

2. In Croatia only tourists really use the train. Everyone else takes the bus.

3. As described above, trains in Croatia are museum-worthy, rare and considered unsafe by locals (in 2020, at midnight on the Zagreb platform, a man with a can of beer spoke to me: “Any Have you ever taken a train? “It was his first time, he was 63 years old at the time and he had gotten drunk because he was very afraid of going to the sea).

4. Strictly speaking, Croatia has one, well, two railway lines: one runs from east to west and the other from north to south. On one route a train runs back and forth twice a day, on the other two trains share the work.

So why is the railway looking for trained drivers precisely in Croatia?

Reward of 2,000 euros

But what irritates the most is the “special bonus” of 2,000 euros. The amount of this reward can only be found in the advertisement with two gender points. On the Croatian side of the DB, however, there is no mention of such a high special bonus for the placement of locomotive drivers. The bonuses are staggered as follows: whoever places a DB employee as an intern or student receives 500 euros. There is 1,000 euros for someone who works for a limited time. And 1,500 euros for a qualified worker who is hired for an unlimited period.

Nothing against bonuses. Croatians also use them to attract foreigners. What for Germans is a shortage of skilled workers, for Croatians is a decline in population. As in Italy, there are Croatian communities selling unfinished or uninhabitable houses at bargain prices to breathe new life into their dying towns.

13 cents for a house

For example, for 13 cents you can buy a house in the town of Legrad, with 2,000 inhabitants, on the border between Croatia and Hungary (distance to the Adriatic: 280 km, distance to the nearest train station: 20 km). As a reward, the buyer will receive a bonus of a few thousand euros for the renovation.

I sent the railway job advertisement to all my Croatian relatives. Nobody wants to apply. They would prefer to know how to get tickets for the Euro Cup. The request to UEFA for tickets for the preliminary round matches was unsuccessful. If tickets are booked successfully, they offer a special bonus.