About this journey

Schladming station sits within the Enns Valley, the starting point of a journey that follows the Ennstalbahn — the Enns Valley Railway — westward through Styria and into the state of Salzburg. The line was originally built and operated by the Empress Elisabeth Railway Company, and it remains an electrified, standard-gauge main line connecting those two Austrian states, carrying traffic well beyond a regional role as an important link toward West Austria and Germany.

At the western end of the journey, Salzburg Hbf has stood as a major interchange since 1860, when the Duchess of Salzburg's Hauptbahnhof was first connected to the international rail network via the Bavarian Maximilian's Railway from Munich and the Empress Elisabeth Railway to Vienna. The station's importance grew again with the completion of the Tauern Railway to Villach and on to Trieste in 1909. Severely damaged by bombing raids in 1944 and 1945, the station was later rebuilt entirely, a project that replaced bay platforms with through platforms at a total cost of 270 million Euros. Today it serves as a junction for the Western Railway from Vienna and Linz, the Rosenheim–Salzburg railway, and routes toward Bischofshofen and Zell am See — a terminus whose layered history spans imperial railways, wartime destruction, and modern reconstruction.