History
During World War I, occupying forces opened up new road sections mainly in the mountainous areas of the country. In King Zog's period, further road construction took place. The total length of Albania's roads more than doubled in the first three decades after World War II, and by the 1980s almost all of the country's remote mountain areas were connected, at least by dirt roads, with the capital city of Tirana and ports on the Adriatic and Ionian Sea. Private ownership was not allowed and the only vehicles circulating were trucks, agricultural and government vehicles, buses, motorcycles, and bicycles. The country's roads, however, were generally narrow, poorly marked, pocked with holes, and in the early 1990s often crowded with pedestrians and people riding mules, bicycles, and horse-drawn carts.
After 1947, a significant infrastructure undertaking was the construction of the country's rail network as Albania was considered as the only state in Europe not to have standard rail service. By 1987, 677 km of railway were constructed in total linking the main urban and industrial centers for the first time since the end of World War II. After the collapse of Communism, the network fell into disregard.
Read more about this topic: Roads In Albania
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)