About this journey

Klagenfurt Hauptbahnhof sits at the western edge of the Carinthian basin and serves as the southern terminus of the Koralm Railway, a 127 km double-track, electrified high-speed line whose construction began in 1999. The initial stretch out of Klagenfurt follows the alignment of the historic Drava Valley Railway, built in the 1860s to connect Maribor with Franzensfeste, before the route transitions onto the modern Koralm corridor.

The engineering centrepiece of that corridor is the 33 km Koralm Tunnel, bored through the Koralpe mountains that divide Carinthia from Styria. The tunnel consists of two single-track tubes with cross-passages every 500 m and an emergency station at its midpoint. Designed to carry passenger trains at up to 250 km/h, the line forms part of the Baltic–Adriatic Corridor linking Gdańsk with Bologna, and was integrated into the Trans-European Transport Core Network in 2013. This October 2023 filming took place within weeks of the Carinthian section opening for services in December 2023.

Beyond the tunnel, the route continues north-east toward Bruck an der Mur, where the journey joins the Bruck an der Mur–Leoben railway, opened on 1 September 1868 by the Austrian Southern Railway Company. Near Leoben, the line passes through the 5,460 m Galgenberg Tunnel, completed in 1998, before arriving at Leoben station — a final passage that moves from one of Austria's newest rail achievements to some of its oldest Styrian infrastructure.