TIRANA, July 26 – A symbolic installation of a steam locomotive was placed this week where Tirana’s old train station is, soon to be replaced with the first electric train going from the capital to Durres.
Mayor of Tirana Erion Veliaj said that soon enough Tirana’s citizens will be able to travel to the Rinas airport and Durres by electric train during the installation ceremony of the steam locomotive at the entrance of the New Boulevard, as a cooperation between the Municipality of Tirana, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy and the Hemingway Fan Club Tirana.
“The new electric train will be passing on the other end, which is why we put the locomotive on this side. Under these opportunities, I believe that within the next mandate we will have the chance to experience the first trip on the electric train, without pollution, from Tirana to Rinas Airport, and then from Tirana to Durres. We will have the opportunity to see where we were, where we are and where we want to go in the future,” said Veliaj.
He added the steam locomotive installation doesn’t only serve as a reminder of the past.
|This locomotive was produced in 1951. This coincides with the year when the first consortium that preceded the EU, the steel and coal union, was created. The agreement of ’51 gave birth to what today is called the European Union, the negotiations with which we will open next year. So this
memory is not only physical, but also political, and humanitarian, as well as a reminder of the fact that relations between people have developed aside science, transforming what started as trade into the multilateral relations we today call the European family,” Veliaj said.
Veliaj stressed that Tirana’s future is not that of a city where the work is done only by the municipality, but one in which its youth adopts a part of the city to beautify it.
“In most countries around the world, a park, a flower, an installation, a statue, are not actually productions of the municipality, but the boys and girls of that city, commune or neighborhood that come together to create a micro-environment, which they adopt,” he said.
The new locomotive located on the New Boulevard was produced in Poland in 1951 while its mission was completed in Albania, in 1986.
It initially served passengers and then freight trains, and will now remind citizens of the railway stations that resemble the stations of life, the stories, the emotions, the love that kept families alive and the distances that this locomotive shortened.
More than a relic of the Albanian railway launch, artists have thought of the steam locomotive as a symbol of the unstoppable journey of Tirana’s development.
