The Bieszczady Forest Railway

From May to October a narrow-gauge train leaves the forest settlement of Majdan and runs nine kilometres to Balnica, near the Slovak border. Balnica was a village of about 500 people before the Second World War. In 1947 its Lemko population was moved to western Poland under Operation Vistula, and the village was never rebuilt. Eight people are registered there now. The railway tells visitors they cannot reach the station by car or coach, so in summer the train still does what a road would do elsewhere, carrying people to a place on the map that has very little left on the ground.

The line opened in January 1898 to bring timber down from these mountains to the main railway at Nowy Łupków. After 1945 it stood idle: the operator's own history gives the depopulation of the Bieszczady as one reason nobody restarted it. Rebuilding began in 1950, for the forests rather than the villages, and by 1964 the network reached 73 kilometres. Regular trains were withdrawn at the end of 1994.

Since July 1997 a foundation has run what remains as a tourist railway, and it now carries around 160,000 people a year, far more than it did when it had a working population to serve.

Trains start from Majdan, 586 metres up in the Solinka valley, where the shed, the yard and the wooden station stand in a settlement built for the railway's own workers in the 1960s. The first bridge beyond the shed has the stone abutments of an earlier bridge, built before 1898, standing beside it, and more of them show on the way to Solinka. For the first dozen minutes or so the track runs beside the Carpathian road, past the houses at Żubracze.

Over the divide

Beyond Żubracze the line crosses the road and turns south into a side valley, with the 1,105-metre mass of Hyrlata on the left and Matragona on the right. The train goes almost the whole way round Matragona. It climbs into the open at Solinka, on the main Carpathian watershed, where a stream rises that drains to the Black Sea by way of the Udava. The steam trains stop here and go back.

Along the border

The diesel trains carry on in a wide curve from south to west, reaching 715 metres on the southern flank of Matragona and running along the Polish-Slovak frontier, with border posts visible from the window. Between 1918 and 1938 the frontier followed the watershed, which put a short stretch of this track inside Czechoslovakia, and trains crossed it escorted by border guards. Poland took over the land on 27 November 1938, and the awkwardness ended.

Balnica, 703 metres, was where timber trains were made up for the run down to Rzepedź and Łupków, which explains the wide grassed-over yard. Passengers get half an hour here, enough for a look round, before the train returns the same way.

The locomotives and coaches

The Balnica trains are hauled by Lyd2 diesels, built by the 23 August works in Bucharest; the operator dates its locomotives to 1977–80. They pull open-sided summer coaches. The summer steam trains use Kp4-3772 and closed coaches with windows. The Kp4 is a Soviet design built at Chrzanów in southern Poland between 1950 and 1959, almost all of them for export, and very few ever worked in Poland. The railway also keeps a smaller forest engine, Las-1884. The eastern route through Cisna towards Przysłup has been out of use since a landslide in 2020.

The railway runs from May to October, and every train is a round trip from Majdan. A return to Balnica takes two hours, including 30 minutes at Balnica, and is diesel-hauled. A return to Solinka takes an hour and a quarter, including 15 minutes there, and is hauled by the steam engine. There are no Monday trains except in July and August.

2026 departures from Majdan

As of November 2026, from the railway's 2026 timetable (opens in a new tab). The 2026 season ended on 25 October, and the 2027 timetable has not yet been published. Last winter the railway was closed from November to the end of April.

Getting to Majdan

Majdan is on the road between Cisna and Komańcza. The nearest main-line station for long-distance trains is Zagórz, about four hours direct from Kraków by PKP Intercity, and there is no rail connection onward to Majdan, so the last stretch is by road. The foundation's office in Majdan answers on +48 13 468 63 35 and at biuro@fbkl.pl.

Both trips cost the same. Tickets are sold online until midnight the day before, but only part of each train goes on sale that way; the rest are sold at the Majdan ticket office on the day. A ticket guarantees a seat, though seats are not numbered, and in high summer the trains fill up. Reduced fares are for children up to 15. Prams and dogs cost 10 zł each, paid on the spot before departure.

Anyone visiting Majdan station without riding pays a 2 zł platform ticket. From the railway's fare poster and ticket page, as of November 2026.

No rail pass covers this railway. Interrail's table of railway companies lists PKP Intercity, POLREGIO and the regional operators for Poland, and no forest railway. Everyone pays the foundation's own fare.

A pass can still get you to the region. PKP Intercity's trains to Zagórz are covered by a Global Pass or a Poland Pass, with reservations recommended or compulsory depending on the train, and POLREGIO regional trains need no reservation.

For this trip alone a pass is not worth buying: the ride is 47 zł. It pays only if the Bieszczady are one stop on a longer journey through Poland or beyond.

Checked November 2026 against Interrail's table of railway companies (opens in a new tab) and the railway's fares (opens in a new tab).

The Bieszczady is walking country, and the railway sits at its quieter western end. The rest of what is worth seeing lies along the roads to Cisna, the national park and Komańcza.

Cisna, close to the Majdan station, is the place to stay for the first train of the day.

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