About this journey

Nova Gorica station sits at the edge of a planned modernist town whose existence is inseparable from the railway beside it. After the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty drew a new border between Yugoslavia and Italy, the historic city of Gorizia fell on the Italian side, and Yugoslavia began building Nova Gorica from 1948 on the land that remained — land defined in part by the alignment of the Bohinj Railway running just to the west of the new frontier. The town was designed by Slovenian architect Edvard Ravnikar, a former pupil of Le Corbusier.

The journey south to Sežana follows the Bohinjska železniška proga, known in full as the Jesenice–Sežana line, aboard a Stadler 610. Sežana station at the far end carries a long and layered history: it opened on 19 July 1857 as part of the South Railway connecting Vienna and Trieste, operated then by the privately owned Austrian Southern Railway. Responsibility passed to Italy's Ferrovie dello Stato after the First World War, and from 1947 the station served as the border crossing between Italy and Yugoslavia. In 1948 it became a junction when a branch to Kreplje connected it with the Bohinj Railway. Slovenian independence in 1991 brought the station under the care of Slovenske železnice, which operates it today. The ride thus moves from a city born of a post-war border to the station that, for decades, marked that border's southern limit.