About this journey

Passau Hauptbahnhof, built in 1860, is one of the more unusual stations on the German rail network: since 1951 it has been operated jointly by DB and ÖBB, a legacy of the city's position on the historic Magistrale trunk route connecting Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg, and Linz to Vienna. The station's circa 130-metre-long classical building once contained two separate pedestrian underpasses divided by a customs wall; that partition was removed after Austria joined the EU in 1995, though the eight platforms retain the scale of a serious international hub. Named international trains including the TEE Prinz Eugen, linking Hamburg and Vienna, once passed through here before the service evolved into IC and later ICE successors.

From Passau the Class 111 heads northwest through Bavaria toward Munich. Munich Hauptbahnhof has its own layered history: the first Munich station opened in 1839, about 800 metres west of the current site, and the lines radiating from the city were progressively electrified between 1925 and 1927. The present station building, rebuilt after wartime damage, was completed on 1 August 1960. Arriving here closes a journey that moves from a cross-border gateway shaped by Austrian and German rail administration to Bavaria's central terminus — two stations whose histories together span nearly two centuries of European railway development.