Freight trains will pass the center of Ljubljana in the future
In the above letter (DiaryDecember 23, 2025) I warned the then Minister Alenko Bratušek about the promise made in the article on January 3, 2025, that in the second half of 2025, the plan for the Ljubljana Railway Junction (LŽV) will be finalized and presented in such a way that “freight rail traffic will no longer pass through the city center”.
She said that they are dealing with the Ljubljana railway hub as a priority and that they are close to the goal of harmonizing the State Spatial Plan (DPN), which should be the basis for the design of the Passenger Center in Ljubljana (PCL), which is being rapidly built without the DPN. The Directorate for Infrastructure (DRSI) said that they will study the issue of separate railway lines for passenger and freight transport and the construction levels of various infrastructure in the city. They checked the bypass lines both on the north and south sides of the city and the course of the freight railway through the city or under the city. “The solution will be determined later this year,” they said on January 3, 2025.
But the urban planner Koželj already wrote in August 2021 that the northwestern ring road is no longer feasible, and to my proposal (Kerševan-Kovač) about the southeastern ring road (September 2021), MOL replied that this alternative was not studied at all. In the program Tarča on TV SLO 1, we learned that an exclusive residential area will be built south of the highway ring road, and the further retreat of the railway to the south is limited by the protection of the Barja, Natura 2000.
Dr. Dr. Fikfak already in 2018. To Alenka Bratušek’s question in the Saturday supplement of Dela on 23/12/2025 about the course of railway tracks and LŽV, and by 23/12/2025 there was no answer. It is not known if the handover report on her work upon the arrival of the new minister also contained the most important answer to the question about DPN and long-term planning of the city, which affects the development of the city, the health and mortality of citizens for a century.
If it is not possible to build a ring road now, since the PCL is being built without a national spatial plan, the government should immediately determine at least the route of the railway ring road to enable its implementation in the future, which, of course, will not be possible without the nationalization of parts of the area where the exclusive residential area is to be built.
Milan Zdravko Kovač, udia, Ljubljana
