About this journey

Maribor railway station, first erected in 1844 and upgraded in 2021, is where the journey begins — one of the oldest station buildings on this cross-border corridor. From here the route heads northwest through Slovenia on Line 401 01, tracing a valley corridor that railways have followed since the nineteenth century.

The historic Drava Valley Railway (Drautalbahn), built in the 1860s to connect Maribor with Franzensfeste, established the alignment that trains still use into Carinthia today. That same corridor forms the shortest rail route between Graz and Klagenfurt without backtracking — a geography that gave rise to one of Austria's most ambitious modern infrastructure projects: the Koralm Railway. This 127 km double-track electrified line, whose construction began in 1999, was integrated into the Trans-European Transport Core Network in 2013 as part of the Baltic–Adriatic Corridor linking the Baltic coast to northern Italy. Its Carinthian section, nearest to Klagenfurt, opened for local services in December 2023, and the complete line opened on 14 December 2025. The line is designed for passenger trains at up to 250 km/h. The journey ends at Klagenfurt — a destination reached today through infrastructure spanning nearly two centuries, from a mid-nineteenth-century valley railway to a tunnel-dominated high-speed corridor beneath the Koralpe mountains.