In 2016, there were no extraordinary and excursion trains for the public in North Moravia and Silesia (as it was common elsewhere at the time), so we decided to establish the Silesian Railway Association and start organizing these special trips ourselves.
Our first event was the Saint Nicolas trains in Ostrava, which in 2016 attracted many people, especially children.
This made us very happy a motivated us to continue with our work.
That is why we started organizing other events, for example train trips to Mala Moravka, or the first sight-seeing trips along the coal sidings in the Ostrava-Karvina black coal district. As people liked the trips with us, we gradually started to add e.g., express trips to Burčák (fermented must) to Mutěnice, trips to the Radegast brewery in Nošovice, or perhaps the wine express to Valtice for wine festivals.
Over the past six years we've grown up a bit and we started to focus on larger projects.
We saved the track from Bruntál to Malá Morávka from being asphalted into a cycle path and we operate our holiday historical excursion trains here. We use our locomotive Rosnička T334.0966 to drive them, which we underwent a major overhaul in 2022, and which is therefore driven around the Jeseníky Mountains during the holidays together with a borrowed historic wagon of the Blm series from Brno.
We also organize trips to the Ostrava ZOO, or the sightseeing Mining express trains (Báňské spěšné vlaky), from which we show to our passengers local reclaimed mining landscape, or the last active deep mine in the Czech Republic.
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With your help, here on the Hithit, we would like to raise the necessary amount of money for the purchase of two older wagons series Bdt.
We plan to repair those wagons this season and we will start to use them on events which are held by us.
They will race on the coal sidings, to the zoo, or take children to the Saint Nicolas trains around Ostrava.
We believe in the power of crowdfunding rather than complicated paperwork and documentation at the bank.
Thanks to the support of our partners from the company PKP CARGO International, in 2022 we managed to obtain a lease of a locomotive depot in the location of the former Barbora mine, in today's Karviná 2- Doly.
Thus we are located in the very heart of old Karviná, i.e.Karwiná in which the plot of Mrs. Karin Lednická’s novel-The Leaning Church takes place. We are only about 400 meters away as the crow flies from this church.
You could say that we are settlers who are slowly trying to bring life back to those places from which people were forcibly driven out by mining in the 1950s. In addition, here we give new life to locomotives that would otherwise end up in scrap.
This long forgotten and abandoned piece of land is slowly returning to the map of Karviná and we are giving it a new use.
The railway connects two points for transporting not only commodities, but also people and ideas.
We are a young association that was founded to support and develop the legacy of railway history in the region of North Moravia and Silesia.
We organize extraordinary and excursion trains to interesting locations and places, not only in Moravian-Silesian region. Thanks to the cooperation with our partners, we succeed in fulfilling our main purpose – and that is the popularization of the railway among the general public.
We aim at families with children, for whom the train has always been a great attraction and a popular means of transport.
However, we do not focus only on families with children – our regular passengers also include children from Ostrava children’s homes, boys and girls from the Ostrava Center Cloverleaf (Čtyřlístek), which takes care of people with various handicaps, or seniors from the Počteníčko project. We reserve free seats for all of our soul mates on the train rides that we organize.
Our region offers a wide choice of many interesting cultural and industrial sights and our goal is connecting these places with the help of rail transport.
Because it is pleasure for us to organize train rides for our passengers. We enjoy having the possibility to fulfill their dreams and to make them happy :)
Are you willing to help us please? Thanks to each donation, we will be closer and closer to our desired goal.
Thank you very much for your support and we look forward to seeing you sometime :)
Your team Association of Silesian Railway :)