About this journey

Nova Gorica station sits at the heart of a planned modernist town built from 1948 onwards, after the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty drew a new border that placed the historic city of Gorizia on the Italian side. That border ran just to the west of the Bohinj Railway, giving the line from the outset a sharply political geography. The journey south follows the Jesenice–Sežana railway — formally the Bohinjska železniška proga — through the Karst toward the Slovenian–Italian frontier.

Sežana station, at the journey's end, carries a long institutional history. It opened on 19 July 1857 as part of the South Railway linking Vienna and Trieste, operated by the private Austrian Southern Railway. After World War II, in 1947, it became the border crossing point between Italy and Yugoslavia, and in 1948 it gained junction status when a branch line to Kreplje connected it to the Bohinj Railway and the broader Yugoslav network. When Slovenia became independent in 1991, operation passed to Slovenske železnice. Sitting very close to the Italian border today, Sežana remains a station whose platform has witnessed the full span of Central European political change — from Habsburg empire to Yugoslav federation to independent Slovenia — in a journey of just over fifty minutes from Nova Gorica.