The "Šarganska Osmica" ("Šargan's Eight") is a museum and tourist railway owned by the Railway Museum of Serbia. This narrow-gauge railway, with gauges of 600 mm and 760 mm, is unique in Europe, and its origins are related to the very beginnings of the Serbian railway traffic.
After the Serbian-Turkish war (1876-1878), a railway Belgrade-Niš, along the Morava River, was built longitudinally through Serbia, and since 1907, the construction of a transversal railway from Stalać, across Užice and Šargan, to Varadište, started. A part of the railway from Stalać to Užice was finished in 1912, before the beginning of the First Balkan War. The Balkan Wars, and thereafter the First World War, postponed the construction of the final section of the railway, from Užice, across Mokra Gora, to the border with Austria-Hungary that annexed Bosnia.
The works on the railway continued in 1916 by Austria-Hungary that occupied a part of Serbia in the meantime. Nine kilometres of the railway was built at that time, as far as the foothills of Šargan. During the drilling of the tunnel through this massif, a rock slide killed around 200 workers, Russian and Italian prisoners of war. Because of this, the work stopped, and continued not until 1921, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. After four years, the railway 22.8 km long, from Šargan Vitas, across Jatar, Mokra Gora, to Varadište, was finally completed. During the construction, it represented a unique endeavour, overcoming a high gradient of 354 m at a small distance, with five bridges and 22 tunnels, of which only the Šargan tunnel was 1,666 m long.
For a long time, the railway represented a major traffic route that linked Belgrade with Sarajevo and Dubrovnik. It is interesting to mention that three decades before it was built, Mitar Tarabić, a famous soothsayer from Kremna, predicted that "an iron road would cross the Gypsy Slope, with an iron fire cart that would always stop by itself at the place where the gypsy camp is now located " (the camp was in one part of Kremna).
The steam locomotives and narrow-gauge railways became a part of the history, and the last passenger train crossed Šargan in 1974. However, following the initiative of the Homeland Society of Mokra Gora, the Railway Transport Company "Beograd" issued a decision in 1999 to restore the railway and to activate it for tourist purposes. The enchanted landscapes make the tour on the old train "Ćira" fit "for careless leisure and pleasure" as predicted by Mitar Tarabić.
Withing the premises of the railway station of Mokra Gora there is a hotel “Šargan's Eight” with 50 beds as well as a National restaurant.