Jibou: last station for abandoned train cars
While visiting our friend’s family in Zalău this Easter we noticed another interesting day destination on the way back to Cluj: a bunch of railway tracks fully packed with abandoned train cars. We left a pin on the map that time and over this weekend finally made a dedicated escape to the place.
There is always something romantic and at the same time sad about abandoned human inventions; primarily technological and industrial (whenever it is trash, it is just trash). However I’d say that at times it could be way more interesting comparing to standard tourist destinations, like monuments or other places of interest. While monuments and architecture legacy shows you how great and majestic was the past, in abandoned places you get only pure feeling of time and true life story of things.
Disclaimer: this place is not a public accessible tourist attraction. We do not encourage you in any way to go there. These tracks are part of functioning train station of Jibou and you have to follow respective rules.
As you enter you see a train standing still on a platform one. The only one thing is that cars of this train are standing here for a while now. For quite a while.
According to the maintenance stamps (only if I read and interpret those correctly), some of cars are parked here permanently from around 2010.
Over these years the whole area got so green that you can hardly see tracks. In some places nature completely took over and trees grow through windows.
It is hard to say why these cars are left here to fade in this way. For most from the outside interior you can’t see any visible and obvious reason (like fire damage or something). Perhaps they just went out of their projected mileage limits or got beyond the regular maintenance need.
You can hardly say that these are taken care of. It is rather another example of broken window theory in action.
We left the place when we got to the sign saying that we are not allowed to go any further.
Artificially made things are doomed to fade slowly unless humans fix them. Yet another reason to celebrate the power of nature (or fix things for the greater good).
