About this journey

Klagenfurt Hauptbahnhof is the western anchor of the Koralm Railway, a 127 km double-track electrified line whose construction began in 1999 and which was integrated into the Trans-European Transport Core Network in 2013 as part of the Baltic–Adriatic Corridor. This journey runs the Carinthian section of that line, which opened for local train services in December 2023, carrying a CITYJET unit southeast toward the Lavant valley.

The route's defining engineering challenge along this corridor was the construction of new infrastructure through demanding terrain, including the diversion of a section of the Lavant river and the relocation of part of the existing Lavanttal railway. Approaching Wolfsberg, the line passes through the Tunnelkette Granitztal, a chain of tunnels with a total subsurface length of around 6 km, cut through the hills that frame the Lavanttal. The Koralm Railway was designed to carry passenger trains at up to 250 km/h — a contrast to the measured pace of this local service, which threads through the same new infrastructure as the high-speed trains that will eventually reduce the full Klagenfurt–Graz journey to 41 minutes. Wolfsberg marks the end of this short run through one of Austria's most consequential recent rail investments.