About this journey

The journey begins at Rijeka station, a neoclassical building designed by Budapest architect Ferenc Pfaff and constructed between 1889 and 1891, now protected by a preservation order. The station first opened on 25 June 1873, its existence driven by the ambition to establish Rijeka as the principal commercial port of the Kingdom of Hungary following the 1868 Croatian–Hungarian Settlement.

The line the train follows is the M202, a 229-kilometre single-tracked railway that forms part of Pan-European corridor V branch B. It opened in 1873 and has long been defined by its steep gradient near Rijeka. Electrification came in stages between 1953 and 1970 under a 3 kV DC system; then in December 2012, the Moravice–Rijeka section was converted to 25 kV AC, bringing the line to a single standard. For years before that conversion, Moravice served as a multi-system interchange where locomotives of different traction systems exchanged trains. The line passed from the Austrian Southern Railway Company to the Hungarian Government in 1880, later into Yugoslav hands, and became Croatian Railways property in 1991.

At the northern end of the route, Zagreb Glavni kolodvor — also designed by Ferenc Pfaff — entered service on 1 July 1892, and the first train to depart from it left for Rijeka, completing a symbolic pairing between the two termini that remains intact today.