Today's calendars mark 19 October 1869 as the day Romania gained its first iron road. Adevarul opened its anniversary column with the Bucharest-Giurgiu line and Filaret station. The date needs a calendar note: the official ceremony, which Historia places on the morning of 31 October 1869, falls on 19 October in the old style. These are not two openings. They are the same day, read in two systems.

The first train with Prince Carol had already left on 7 September 1869, so he could keep his word not to leave the country until he had travelled on Romanian rails. On 31 October, after Metropolitan Nifon's service, the "Michaiu Bravul" honour train left Filaret at 10.45 and reached Giurgiu around 12.30. Sixty-seven kilometres, about an hour and a half, at some 45 km/h.

The concession had sat with British engineers John Trevor Barkley and John Staniforth since 13 September 1865. Work started from both ends in 1867. In October 1868 Giurgiu saw the first two locomotives, 1-Sabaru and 2-Giurgiu, from Canada Works-Birkenhead. The station on Filaret hill was Bucharest's end of that thread, not a shop-window monument.

Filaret remained the capital's only station only until 13 September 1872, when Targovistei station opened, later Gara de Nord from 1888. A seven-kilometre link tied the two ends across the Dambovita and Spirea Hill. In the 1960s Filaret left railway use and became a coach station. The building still stands. The train no longer comes in.

Adevarul also lined up, on the same day, Mihail Sadoveanu's death, streptomycin and Black Monday. They do not change the railway thread. The 157-year mark belongs to the first line built on the territory of the Principalities, not to an almanac in which every event weighs the same.

Anyone crossing Filaret Station Square today sees a coach yard and a facade. Under them is the end from which Romania learned, in 1869, that the distance to the Danube can be counted in hours, not in cart-days. Calendar precision does not shrink the fact. It puts it on the right date.

Image: Profpcde, Filaret station, Bucharest, CC0, Wikimedia Commons; today's building, a coach station, not the 1869 platform.

Sources consulted: 19 October 1869, the day Romania entered the railway age - Adevarul; 31 October 1869: opening of the Bucharest-Giurgiu railway - Historia.