About this journey

Hodoš station sits at Slovenia's only railway border crossing with Hungary, a point where the electrification system changes from Hungary's 25 kV AC to Slovenia's 3 kV DC. The line west from here toward Murska Sobota and beyond has a layered history: originally built in 1907, it was closed in 1968 and lay dormant for three decades before being rebuilt in 1999–2001 in a less winding alignment as part of Pan-European Corridor V, the freight and passenger axis linking Venice and Koper through Ljubljana and Maribor to Budapest. The rebuilt line is designed for international trains at up to 160 km/h, and electrification across the full Pragersko–Hodoš section was completed in April 2016.

Corridor V continues south-west through the Slovenian interior toward Ljubljana, where it intersects with Corridor X, making Ljubljana station the operational hub of the entire SŽ network. The station itself is one of the older surviving railway termini in the region, completed on 18 April 1848. A major expansion and renovation costing around 167 million euros began in autumn 2024, with completion planned for 2026, part-financed with European funds. The journey from the Hungarian border to the Slovenian capital thus moves between two different scales of railway history: a corridor rebuilt at the turn of the millennium to meet modern European standards, arriving at a nineteenth-century station being reshaped for the decades ahead.