The speed never exceeded 25 kilometers per hour. This was the secret of the Mocănița : it was slow enough that you could see the fox pause on the embankment to watch you pass. Slow enough that a boy on a horse kept pace with the last carriage for a full kilometer, laughing. Slow enough that the old woman in the signal box at Prislop Pass had time to wave, then light a candle, then wave again.
As the locomotive drifted to a gentle stop at the wooden platform, steam curling around the wheels, the groom was there. Not the cheating one—a different one. A quiet forester from Gura Humorului who had been watching the Mocănița pass his cabin every Tuesday for seven years, waiting for the right passenger to get off.
Andrei drained his țuică , tapped the pressure gauge, and whispered to the old Resicza: "Not bad for a dead railway, eh, girl? Not bad at all."
"Pită, Andrei?" shouted Măria, the conductor’s wife, shoving a loaf of warm bread through the cab window. "You can’t drive on holy water alone." msts romania
Today was the "Train of the Witches," a Halloween-themed run from Câmpulung Moldovenesc up to the painted monasteries of the Bucovina region. The carriages were packed. Not with tourists with iPads, but with locals.
Then came the tunnel.
"Măria!" Andrei shouted down the side of the train. "We need a glass of țuică ! The bride has decided to live!" The speed never exceeded 25 kilometers per hour
This wasn’t just any train. It was MSTS Romania —the "Mica Surgerea a Transporturilor pe Șine" (The Little Rise of Rail Transport), a preservation society born from the chaos of the 1990s when the iron horse was being replaced by the diesel camel. They had salvaged this engine from a scrapyard in Reșița, found the cars rotting in a forest near Vatra Dornei, and rebuilt them bolt by bolt.
Inside the three wooden carriages, the world had slipped sideways. In the first car, a group of teenagers dressed as iele —the ghostly fairies of Romanian folklore—used their phone lights to cast eerie shadows on the wood-paneled ceiling. In the second, an old man in a sheepskin hat was tuning a cimpoi (bagpipe). In the third, a bride—fleeing her own wedding in Vatra Moldoviței because she’d seen her groom kiss the maid of honor—sat crying into a handkerchief embroidered with the word Vis (Dream).
The Cailor Tunnel was 980 meters of absolute darkness bored through living rock. As the locomotive swallowed the light, Andrei did what his father had taught him: he turned off the single bulb in the cab. For thirty seconds, MSTS Romania vanished from the world. Slow enough that the old woman in the
He handed the bride a wildflower. She took it.
Andrei pulled the whistle cord. The sound— uuuuu-huuuuu —rolled through the gorge like a wounded stag. The pistons clanked. The wheels slipped once, bit into the steel, and they were moving.
The rain over the Carpathian foothills had turned the narrow-gauge tracks of the Mocănița into twin rivers of rust and mud. Andrei, a driver for the CFF (Romanian State Railway) for thirty years, watched the water bead on the brass of his pressure gauge. The locomotive, a veteran Resicza from 1952, breathed steam into the cold air like an old dragon dreaming of fire.
When they burst out the other side, the sun had broken through. The monasteries of Bucovina—Voronet, with its famous blue; Humor, with its reds—stood on the hillside like toys. The teenagers gasped. The old man started the cimpoi drone. And the bride, looking at the fresco of the Last Judgment on the monastery wall, suddenly smiled.