About this journey

Ljubljana railway station, whose building was completed on 18 April 1848, is the starting point for a journey that follows one of the great Habsburg-era trunk routes to the Adriatic. The line connecting Vienna through Ljubljana and Pivka to Rijeka was a product of imperial trade ambition: following the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement of 1868, Rijeka became the primary commercial port of the Kingdom of Hungary, and the pressure to link it by rail led to the route's completion in 1873.

From Ljubljana the train heads south-west, passing through Pivka before crossing into Croatia toward Rijeka. The Rijeka–Pivka section carries a particular engineering legacy — after World War I, the Italian state railways electrified it with a 3000 V DC system, a standard that reflected the line's decades under Ferrovie dello Stato ownership before its postwar transfer to the Yugoslav Railways network and, from 1991, to Croatian Railways (HŽ). Rijeka station itself is a fitting destination: its neoclassical building, designed by Budapest architect Ferenc Pfaff and constructed between 1889 and 1891, stretches 150 m along the platform and sits close to the port it was built to serve. The building is today under a preservation order. The journey thus moves from a station being renovated for a new era to one carefully protected as a monument to the railway ambitions of the nineteenth century.