About this journey

Hof Hauptbahnhof carries a layered history into its platforms. Built jointly by the Bavarian and Saxon railway administrations between 1874 and 1880, the station was designed so that the border between the two administrations ran exactly through the middle of the building along its axis of symmetry. After 1945 the Iron Curtain cut the city off to the north and east, and Hof became a frontier again: locomotive exchanges between DB and Deutsche Reichsbahn traction took place here on inter-zonal trains, and in 1989 trains carrying refugees from the German embassy in Prague arrived at these platforms during the collapse of the GDR.

The route south from Hof follows the Weiden–Oberkotzau railway, a two-track main line forming part of the long-distance corridor from Munich to Hof and onward to Leipzig and Dresden, whose final gap was closed on 1 June 1882. North of Marktredwitz the line crosses the eastern foothills of the Fichtelgebirge before running parallel to the river Saale into Hof. The Class 612 tilting units that work this corridor have been maintained at Hof's Betriebswerk depot since its modernisation in 2000 and 2001. At the southern end of the journey, Regensburg Hauptbahnhof sits at the crossing of the Munich–Hof and Nuremberg–Passau main lines — a station that waited until 1859 to join the railway network at all, when the Bavarian Eastern Railway finally linked it to Nuremberg and Munich.