ABSTRACT
The Sub-Savian Magistral was the name given to a railway project intended to double the main trunk line which runs across Yugoslavia from the Italian border through Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and Skopje to the Greek border. The line was to be built parallel to the Sava River, about one hundred kilometres to the south hence its name, Sub-Savian Magistral. Reviving the Sub-Savian Magistral would deprive Serbia as well as Croatia of transit traffic between east and west for the benefit of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Sub-Savian Magistral would have deeply transformed and improved the geography of transportation in Yugoslavia. The new Yugoslavia formed after World War One was constituted around Serbia by territories which had previously been controlled by the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires. With the Berlin Treaty of 1878, it was not by chance that the Austro-Hungarians imposed the Morava-Vardar route for the construction of the first railway line intended to connect Vienna and Budapest with Constantinople.
