About this journey

The journey begins at Innsbruck Hauptbahnhof, a station rebuilt from scratch after its complete destruction in World War II, with the current building designed by architects Riegler Riewe and officially opened on 19 May 2004. It is the junction of five distinct lines, among them the Lower Inn Valley Railway, which carries the route northeast toward the Bavarian border.

That line's history reaches back to 1853, when Emperor Franz Joseph I approved the route from Innsbruck toward the Inn Valley, with the extension to the border city of Kufstein following in 1854. Today the same corridor is one of the busiest in Austria, handling up to 430 trains a day between Baumkirchen and Wörgl, and is currently being rebuilt as a four-track line as part of the TEN Berlin–Palermo axis. At Wörgl the route takes its northern branch via Kufstein and crosses into Bavaria, where the ÖBB Class 1116 Taurus continues through Rosenheim toward Munich. The first station at Munich's current site opened on 1 October 1849, and overhead electrification on the lines radiating from it was completed between 1925 and 1927. The journey thus moves from an Alpine junction shaped by nineteenth-century imperial ambition to one of Germany's principal railway gateways.