Nostalgic Railroads of southern Poland

The EU is stepping in to help repair the time-ravaged railroads of southern Poland. Years of utter neglect and the rise of other forms of transport, not to mention the frequently fluctuating borders in the region have left them in an extremely sorry state, yet they still retain their rustic beauty and many stretches remain operational.
Little has changed on those routes since the Austrian administration of the former imperial province of Galicia had them erected at the end of the XIX century. Since the mountainous areas they run through have always been relatively thinly populated and there has never been much industry in the area, the new railways were designed with strategic considerations in mind. Their primary task was to enable the transport of soldiers and war materials from the heart of the Austro- Hungarian Empire to the projected future front with Russia.
The substantial expense of their construction payed itself off very handsomely during the desperate winter of 1915 when the Russians threatened to break over the Carpathian mountains into the very heart of the Austrian Empire. The front held long enough to stave off the incessant Russian attacks and enable a rescue operation by the allied Germans. In March of 1915 they began an offensive that pushed the tsarist troops out of Galicia and ended the threat they posed to Central Europe.
After the Habsburg Empire fell apart in 1918 a new Czechoslovak- Polish frontier ran across the crest of the mountains, 1945 saw the drawing of the Polish- Soviet frontier further splintering the region. What were once concipated to be long haul trunk lines suddenly had to play the role of regional dead- end spurs. Coupled with the presence of a lethargic economic system, the decay of those lines was all but assured.
The bad state of rail infrastructure hampers Poland's trade with Slovakia, a fellow EU member, and with the Ukraine. Funding provided by Brussels should in the long- term serve to remedy the situation.