About this journey

Ljubljana railway station, completed on 18 April 1848, stands as one of Slovenia's principal rail hubs, and it is here that the Tarvisio–Ljubljana Railway begins its northward run through the Sava valley toward Jesenice. The line opened on 14 December 1870 as part of the Austro-Hungarian Rudolfsbahn network, and following a financial crisis in 1884 it passed into the hands of the Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways. Leaving Ljubljana, only the short section through the Ljubljana Šiška marshalling yards is double-track; beyond that, the 64.5 km route narrows to a single-track line electrified at 3 kV DC for the remainder of the run to Jesenice.

At Jesenice, the line reaches a frontier junction in the Sava Dolinka valley, close to the borders with both Austria and Italy. The cross-border extension toward Tarvisio has been closed since 1967 on the Italian side and 1969 on the Slovenian side, leaving this Ljubljana–Jesenice section as the surviving open portion of the original route. The station building itself was rebuilt between 1953 and 1955 to replace a structure destroyed by Allied air raids in early 1945, and from here the Karawanks Railway continues northward through the Karawanks Tunnel, opened in 1906, toward Villach in Austria.