TIR trucks, delivery vans and passenger cars constantly streaming along the city bypass have nowadays replaced many former, especially local, rail services, which were used to deliver essential raw materials to industrial plants and, in a similar way, transport finished goods or semi-finished products from them to customers.
Today, perhaps only in one place—near the Opałkowa Chata restaurant on Wróblewski Street—can one still occasionally see a set of tank cars slowly hauled by a diesel locomotive crossing a busy asphalt road. Yet this is only a faint shadow of what Bolesławiec was still living through several decades ago.
Trains instead of TIR trucks and courier vans
Maps from 50–60 years ago still show a veritable web of tracks crossing streets and reaching various parts of the city, where sidings and loading ramps once operated. Rails led, among other places, to the former “Concordia,” to the factory yard now occupied by the bus station, to the former Hoffmann plants (today Zakłady Ceramiczne “Bolesławiec”), to the now-defunct Carlswerk glassworks—which once stood where the blocks built along Chrobrego Street now stand—and to the grain elevators on Tysiąclecia Street.
Obviously, today’s volume of car traffic in Bolesławiec, for example, is difficult to compare with the period when slow locomotives moved freight trains along the tracks. At that time, the brief stops of the few cars halted at railway crossings were not particularly troublesome. The most problematic intersections of tracks and streets were probably those on the roads entering the city, including near the end of present-day Tysiąclecia Street. Passenger trains running to Nowa Wieś Grodziska also regularly “blocked” the road there.
A similar but less heavily used spot was the track running across present-day Zgorzelecka Street. Freight trains traveled along it from the station to “Concordia” (or in the opposite direction), passing close to the roadway through a stone gate in the park wall that still exists today. And it was precisely there—as one of Bolesławiec’s first post-war residents claimed—that a strange accident, or even an attempted attack, took place. The full circumstances of the incident will most likely remain a mystery forever.
An urban legend. The Soviets loot “Concordia”
It was 1945. Soviet soldiers were dismantling equipment inside the factory. A witness to the incident told regional historian Zdzisław Abramowicz that a strange accident, or even an attempted attack, had occurred there. Although the circumstances of the incident will probably remain a mystery forever.
Inside “Concordia,” Soviet soldiers gathered goods brought from all over into the deserted halls, gradually loading them onto wagons and sending them to the Soviet Union. Road traffic on this street was negligible in those months—every now and then, a horse-drawn cart or wagon passed by.
The evening silence was broken by the rumble of a train announcing its approach with the whistle of its steam locomotive. A Red Army soldier holding a kerosene lamp stood on the road beside the tracks when a battered military vehicle rolled onto the rails directly in front of the approaching train, which was loaded with goods looted by the Soviets. The vehicle, passing the frightened sentry, rolled onto the track—and then its sputtering engine died. The driver jumped out of the cab and ran toward what is now the park of the Museum of Ceramics. The vehicle’s cargo bed was supposedly carrying unexploded ordnance.
A great mystery. Was it an attack on the Soviets?
The soldier guarding the tracks was stunned, then began desperately signaling to the engineer, trying to stop the locomotive pulling several wagons loaded with loot. The wheels of the sharply braking train screeched, but it was too late—the locomotive’s buffer smashed into the vehicle’s cab, pushing it aside. After several dozen meters, the train finally stopped.
According to the account recorded for posterity by Zdzisław Abramowicz, the vehicle’s cargo bed supposedly contained several large wartime unexploded ordnance items. Whether this was an attempt at a “terrorist” attack on a train filled with loot remains unanswered. The fate of the mysterious driver is also unknown. What is more, there is not even any certainty that the event actually unfolded in this way—or that it happened at all. Although in those troubled times, anything was possible.
Today, the only trace of the former track leading to the former “Concordia” is a path running along part of its old route. And only the stone gate with its steel hinges still stands as it did in the past.